NOTES 

ON SHAKESPEARE'S 

WORKMANSHIP 



FROM LECTURES BY 



SIR ARTHUR QUILLER- COUCH, M.A. 

Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge; King Edward VII 
Professor of English Literature 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1917 






Copyright, 1917, 

BY 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



MAY 26 1917 



THE QUINN A RODCN CO. PRCBS 
RAHWAY, N. J. 



G)C.|.A4r)7187 



Co 

PROFESSOR 
BARRETT WENDELL 

IN GRATITUDE FOR 

MANY PLEASURES OF INSIGHT 

DIRECTED BY 

HIS ILLUMINATING COMMON-SENSE 



PREFACE 

The following papers were first written as Lectures 
and so spoken before an audience in the University of 
Cambridge. Being shy of repeating myself too often in 
print in the guise of a lecturer, I have turned my second 
persons plural into third persons singular. But I am 
sensible that the change will only commend itself by help 
of the reader's good-will in remembering all the while 
that these are familiar discourses rather than learned 
enquiries. 

They seek to discover, in some of Shakespeare's plays, 
just what he was trying to do as a playwright. This has 
always seemed to me a sensible way of approaching him, 
and one worth reverting to from time to time. For it is 
no disparagement to the erudition and scholarship that 
have so piously been heaped about Shakespeare to say that 
we shall sometimes find it salutary to disengage our minds 
from it all, and recollect that the poet was a playwright. 

I must thank my brother-in-law, Mr. John Hay Lobban, 
for reading these pages in proof and making an index 
for me. 

Aethub Quiller-Couch. 



CONTENTS 

PAGB 

PREFACE V 

CHAPTER 

I MACBETH. I 3 

Ways of studying Shakespeare — Method proposed 
for these notes — Macbeth to be considered as a piece 
of workmanship — The Elizabethan Theatre, its 
audience and its stage — Shakespeare's ' conditions ' — 
His ' material ' — The ' material ' of Macbeth — The 
capital difficulty of Macbeth as a tragedy — How- 
Shakespeare might have extenuated it — How, rather, 
before setting to work, he made his problem as hard 
as possible. 

II MACBETH. II 22 

The criminal hero — Hallucination — What is witch- 
craft? — Dr. Johnson on the witches in Macbeth — 
" Evil, be thou my good " — The use of darkness and 
its suggestions, in Shakespeare's tragedies — Schiller 
and Schlegel — Vagueness of the witches — " A deed 
without a name " — Deliberate enfeebling of all char- 
acters, save in the two protagonists — The critical 
word in this drama — ^The knocking at the gate. 

Ill MACBETH. Ill 40 

De Quincey on the knocking at the gate — Dramatic 
effect of the ' closed door ' — Inside and outside — The 
porter — ' Flattening ' of minor characters — Banquo'a 
part in the drama — The point of rest in art — 
Macduff, Lady Macduff, and the child — Lady Mac- 
beth and the broken spring — Tragic ' irony ' — 
Peculiar ' irony ' of Macbeth — Relation of this play 
to Greek tragedy — Its greatness. 

IV A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM .... 60 
Shakespeare's and Dickens's use of pet devices — 
Women in male disguise — Shipwrecks — Influence of 
Lyly and Plautus — Advance from stagecraft to char- 
acterisation — The stigmata of a court play — The 
value of inquiring How icas the thing done? — The 
import of the fairies and the clowns — An ideal set- 
ting for the play. 

vii 



viii CONTENTS 

OHAPTEB PAGE 

V THE MERCHANT OF VENICE .... 78 

Its juvenile appeal — The difference between setting 
and atmosphere — Unsympathetic characters — Bas- 
sanio and Antonio — Bad workmanship — A vital flaw 
— Two sides of the Renaissance — Three plots of in- 
trigue — Plot versus character — The humanising of 
Shylock — Exaggerated estimate of the Trial Scene — 
An amateur stage-manager's tribute to the workman- 
ship of the play — Johnson on the " holy hermit " — 
The fifth Act. 

yi AS YOU LIKE IT 98 

Lodge's Rosalynde, and the Tale of Gamelyn — The 
Forest of Arden — Its site on the Avon — A fantasy in 
colour — Jaques and Touchstone — A fantastic criti- 
cism of life — Playing at Robin Hood — Swinburne and 
George Sand — The influence of Lyly — A piece of 
botchwork. 

VII THE STORY OF FALSTAFF 114 

An innovation — A permanent artistic principle in 
the treatment of history by fiction — An Aristotelian 
induction — A tetralogy and a pageant — Its unity of 
theme and treatment — The tradition of Chaucer — 
Falstaff and the Interludes — Meaning of Interlude — 
FalstafF in The Merry Wives — Prince Hal and Henry 
the Fourth — Characters and their creators — David 
Copperfield — Johnson on Falstaff — The dismissal of 
Falstaff — Why Shakespeare killed him — The scenes 
at the Boar's Head — The apotheosis of good-fellow- 
ship. 

VIII HAMLET. I 137 

A factitious mystery — ^A masterpiece, not a prob- 
lem — The evidence of its perennial popularity — Every 
' star ' his own Hamlet — Highest art never unin- 
telligible — Some imperfect diagnoses of Hamlet — A 
masterly opening — Superbness of diction — A flaw of 
construction. 



IX HAMLET. II 156 

Polonius and Laertes — A family failing — ^The lone- 
liness of Ophelia — The cause of Hamlet's horror — 
The two keys to Hamlet's soul — Criticism divorced 
from knowledge of life — Beatrice Cenci — Hamlet's 
" madness " and hesitancy — The Queen's insight into 
Hamlet — Shakespeare's passing misogyny — Hamlet's 
affected madness before fools — His moral scrupulous- 
ness — A self-explanatory soliloquy. 



CONTENTS ix 

CHAFTXR FAQH 

X HAMLET. Ill 177 

The simple secret of the critics — Coleridge and 
another — " It is we who are Hamlet," the key is in 
every man's breast — An old play furbished and re- 
furbished — How this explains Ophelia in Hamlet's 
brutality — Blank verse as a vehicle for drama — Dry- 
den's examination examined — Milton and the caesura 
— Dryden's own practice versus his theory — How 
blank verse helps the actor. 

XI SHAKESPEARE'S LATER WORKMANSHIP . . 196 
The last group of plays — General characteristics — 
Some striking resemblances — One common theme, a 
woman wrongfully used — ^Neglect of Unity of Time 
— Alleged decline in power — The agony of Imogen — 
The reconciliation of man with man — The artist's 
last infirmity — Shakespeare's theme and stage limita- 
tions — Probable development of scenic resources in 
the Elizabethan stage — Influence of the masque — 
Sea-scenes — Reconciliation through the young and 
for the young — Blending of tragedy and comedy. 

XII " PERICLES " AND " KING HENRY VIII " . . 215 
Popularity of Pericles — A new sensation — Epic in 
terms of drama — The authorship of the first two 
acts — The evidence of workmanship — Verse tests — 
Authenticity of the brothel scenes — The recognition 
scene — The different verdict of the library and of the 
stage — Historical plays as pageants — The authorship 
of Henry VIII — Moral unity the highest. 

XIII CYMBELINE 232 

Johnson on the plot of Cynibeline — Imperfect sym- 
pathies — Truth of imagination, of emotion, and of 
fact — ^A critical disability — Shakespeare's magic — 
His work conditioned by the Elizabethan stage — The 
theme of Cymbeline — The glory of Imogen — Imagi- 
nary letter from Shakespeare to Johnson — Echoes in 
Cymbeline — The whole greater than the parts — 
Complexity of the plot. 

XIV THE WINTER'S TALE 254 

The Winter's Tale — Echoes of Pericles — ^Fusion of 
tragedy and comedy — Futility of hard definitions — 
False criticism of its structure — The author's aim — 
An honest failure — The jealousy of. Leontes — Some 
careless workmanship — The fate of Antigonus — The 
part of Autolycus — The recognition scene — Deliberate 
faery — Weakness of the plot as a whole — The unap- 
proachable love-scene. 



X CONTENTS 

CBAPTBB PAGB 

XV THE TEMPEST. I 2/1 

Date of The Tempest — Cunningham's discovery — 
His rehabilitation — Dr. Garnett's theory — Elizabeth 
of Bohemia — Probability of the play's revision for a 
nuptial ceremony. 

XVI THE TEMPEST. II 286 

Workmanship is evidence of date of Tempest — 
Comparison with The Winter's Tale — Gonzalo's com- 
monwealth — Youthful love stronger than Prospero's 
magic — An exquisite surprise — The most beautiful 
love-scene in Shakespeare — Supposed sources of the 
play — Its central theme — Difficulty of handling rec- 
onciliation in a three-hours play — Shakespeare's at- 
tempts to overcome it — The Unities not laws but 
graces — Shakespeare's " royal ease." 

XVII THE TEMPEST. Ill 306 

Argument for The Tempest being a marriage play 
— Its position in the Folio — An imagined first night 
— The uses of the inner stage — The realistic accuracy 
of the opening scene — Landlubber criticisms — Cole- 
ridge on Prospero's " retrospective narration " — The 
dignity of Perdita and Miranda — Shakespeare's sym- 
pathy extending to Caliban — The contribution of 
Stephano — Comparison of The Tempest and A Mid- 
summer-Night's Dream — Prospero — Danger of sup- 
posing autobiography — A play for all time. 

INDEX 333 



NOTES ON SHAKESPEARE'S 
WORKMANSHIP 



CHAPTER I 
MACBETH 



Ways of studying Shakespeare — ^INIethod proposed for these notes — 
Macbeth to be considered as a piece of workmanship — The Eliza- 
bethan Theatre, its audience and its stage — Shakespeare's 'condi- 
tions' — His 'material' — The 'material' of Macbeth — The capital 
difficulty of Macbeth as a tragedy — How Shakespeare might have 
extenuated it — ^How, rather, before setting to work, he made his 
problem as hard as possible. 

(1) 

I PEOPOSE to take a single work of art, of admitted ex- 
cellence, and consider its workmanship. I choose Shake- 
speare's tragedy of Macbeth as being eminently such a 
work: single or complete in itself, strongly imagined, 
simply constructed, and in its way excellent beyond any 
challenging. 

There are, of course, many other aspects from which 
so unchallengeable a masterpiece deserves to be studied. 
We may seek, for example, and seek usefully, to fix its 
date and define its place in order of time among Shake- 
speare's writings; but this has been done for us, nearly 
enough. Or we may search it for light on Shakespeare, 
the man himself, and on his history — so obscure in the 
main, though here and there lit up by flashes of evidence, 
contemporary and convincing so far as they go. Por my 
part, while admitting such curiosity to be human, and 



4 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

suffering myself now and again to be intrigued by it, I 
could never believe in it as a pursuit that really mat- 
tered. All literature must be personal: yet tbe artist — 
the great artist — dies into his work, and in that survives. 
What dread hand designed the Sphinx? What dread 
brain conceived its site, there, overlooking the desert? 
What sort of man was he who contrived Memnon, with 
a voice to answer the sunrise? WTiat were the domestic 
or extra-domestic habits of Pheidias? Whom did Villon 
rob or Cellini cheat or Moliere mock? Why did Shake- 
speare bequeath to his wife his second-best bed? These 
are questions which, as Sir Thomas Browne would say, 
admit a wide solution, and I allow some of them to be 
fascinating. " Men are we," and must needs wonder, a lit- 
tle wistfully, concerning the forerunners, our kinsmen 
who, having achieved certain things we despair to im- 
prove or even to rival, have gone their way, leaving so 
much to be guessed. " How splendid," we say, " to have 
known them ! Let us delve back and discover all we can 
about them ! " 

Brave lads in olden musical centuries 
Sang, night by night, adorable choruses, 

Sat late by alehouse doors in April, 
Chaunting in joy as the moon was rising. 

Moon-seen and merry, under the trellises, 
Flush-faced they played with old polysyllables; 

Spring scents inspired, old wine diluted, 
Love and Apollo were there to chorus. 

Now these, the songs, remain to eternity, * 

Those, only those, the bountiful choristers 

Gone — those are gone, those unremembered 
Sleep and are silent in earth for ever. 



MACBETH 5 

Ko: it is no ignoble quarrel we hold with Time over 
these men. Eut, after all, the moral of it is summed 
up in a set of verses ascribed to Homer, in which he ad- 
dresses the Delian Women. " Farewell to you all," he 
says, " and remember me in time to come : and when any 
one of men on earth, a stranger from far, shall enquire 
of you, ' O maidens, who is the sweetest of minstrels here 
about ? and in whom do you most delight ? ' then make 
answer modestly, ' Sir, it is a blind man, and he lives in 
steep Chios.' " 

But the shutters are up at The Mermaid: and, after all, 
it is the masterpiece that matters — the Sphinx herself, the 
Iliad, the Parthenon, the Perseus, the song of the Old 
Heaulmieres, Tartufe, Macbeth. 

Lastly, I shall not attempt a general criticism of Mac- 
heth, because that work has been done, exquisitely and (I 
think) perdurably, by Dr. Bradley, in his published Lec- 
tures on Shakespearian Tragedy, a book which I can 
hardly start to praise without using the language' of ex- 
travagance: a book which I hold to belong to the first 
order of criticism, to be a true ornament of our times. 
Here and there, to be sure, I cannot accept Dr. Bradley's 
judgment : but it would profit my readers little to be taken 
point by point through these smaller questions at issue, 
and (what is more) I have not the necessary self- 
confidence. 

If, however, we spend a little while in considering 
Macbeth as a piece of worTcmanship (or artistry, if you 
prefer it), we shall be following a new road which 
seems worth a trial — perhaps better worth a trial just be- 
cause it lies off the trodden way; and whether it happen 



6 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

or not to lead us out upon some fresh and lively view of 
this particular drama, it will at least help us by the way 
to clear our thoughts upon dramatic vn*iting and its 
method: while I shall not he false to my belief in the 
virtue of starting upon any chosen work of literature 
absolutely, with minds intent on discovering just that 
upon which the author's mind was intent. 

I shall assume that Macbeth is an eminently effective 
play ; that, by consent, it produces a great, and intended, 
impression on the mind. It is the shortest of Shake- 
speare's plays, save only The Comedy of Errors. It is 
told in just under 2,000 lines — scarcely more than 
half the length of Hamlet. We may attribute this 
brevity in part — and we shall attribute it rightly — ^to its 
simplicity of plot, but that does not matter ; or, rather, it 
goes all to Macbeth' s credit. The half of artistry con- 
sists in learning to make one stroke better than two. 
,The more simply, economically, you produce the impres- 
sion aimed at, the better workman you may call yourself. 

]^ow what had Shakespeare to do9 He — a tried and 
competent dramatist — had to write a play: and if it be 
answered that everbody knew this without my telling it, I 
reply that it is the first thing some commentators forget. 
This play had to be an ^ acting play ' : by which of course 
I mean a play to succeed on the boards and entertain, 
for three hours or so,^ an audience which had paid to be 
entertained. This differentiates it at once from a literary 
composition meant to he read by the fireside, where the 

* In the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare talks of " the 
two hours' traffic of our stage." But the actual performance must 
have taken longer than two hours. 



MACBETH 7 

kettle does all the hissing. Therefore, to understand 
what Shakespeare as a workman was driving at, we must 
in imagination seat ourselves amid the audience he had 
in mind as he worked. 

Moreover we must imagine ourselves in the Globe 
Theatre, Southwark, different in so many respects from 
the playhouses we know: because at every point of dif- 
ference we meet with some condition of which Shake- 
speare had to take account. The stage, raised pretty 
much as it is nowadays, was bare and ran out for some 
way into the auditorium, the central area of which was 
unroofed. Thus — the fashionable time for the theatre 
being the afternoon — the action, or a part of it, took 
place in daylight. When daylight waned, lanterns were 
called in, and some may agree with me, after study- 
ing Shakespeare's sense of darkness and its artistic value, 
that it were worth while, with this in mind, to tabulate 
the times of year, so far as we can ascertain them, at 
which his several plays were first performed. For my 
part, I am pretty sure that, among other conditions, he 
worked with an eye on the almanac. 

To return to the stage of the Globe Theatre. — ^N"ot only 
did it run out into the auditorium : the audience returned 
the compliment by overflowing it. Stools, ranged along 
either side of it, were much in demand by young gentle- 
men who wished to show off their fine clothes. These 
young gentlemen smoked — or, as they put it, " drank " 
— ^tobacco in clay pipes. So the atmosphere was free 
and easy; in its way (I suspect) not much unlike that 
of the old music-halls I frequented in graceless days, 
where a corpulent chairman called for drinks for which, 



8 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

if privileged to know him and sit beside him, you sub- 
sequently paid; where all joined companionably in a 
chorus; where a wink from the singer would travel — I 
know not how — around four-fifths of a complete circle. 

The Elizabethan theatre had no painted scenery;^ or 
little, and that of the rudest. At the back of the stage, 
at some little height above the heads of the players, 
projected a narrow gallery, or platform, with (as I 
suppose) a small doorway behind it, and a ' prac- 
ticable ' ladder to give access to it or be removed, as oc- 
casion demanded. Eix the ladder, and it became the 
stairway leading to Duncan's sleeping-chamber: take it 
away, and the gallery became the battlements of Dun- 
sinane, or Juliet's balcony, or Brabantio's window, or 
ShylocVs from which Jessica drops the coffer, or Cleopa- 
tra's up to which she hales dying Antony. From the 
floor of this gallery to the floor of the stage depended 
draperies which, as they were drawn close or opened, 
gave you the arras behind which Ealstaff was discovered 
in slumber, or Polonius stabbed, the tomb of Juliet, Des- 
demona's bed, the stage for the play-scenes in Hamlet 
and the Midsummer-NigJifs Dream, the cave of Pros- 
per© or of Hecate. 

To right and left of this draped alcove, beyond the 
pillars supporting the gallery, were two doors giving on 

»"The Elizabethan Stage," "the Elizabethan Drama," are terms 
which actually cover a considerable period of time. It is certain 
that — say between 1550 and 1620 — the theatre enormously improved 
its apparatus: upon the masques, as we know, very large sums of 
money were spent: and I make no doubt that before the close of 
Shakespeare's theatrical career, painted scenes and tapestries were the 
fashion. 



MACBETH 9 

the back and the green-room — mimorum aedes — ^for the 
entrances and exits of the players. 

Such was the Elizabethan theatre, with an audience so 
disposed that, as Sir Walter Ealeigh puts it, " the groups 
of players were sepn from many points of view, and had 
to aim at statuesque rather than pictorial effect." When 
we take this into account with the daylight and the lack 
of scenic background, we at once realise that it miLst have 
been so, and that these were the conditions under which 
Shakespeare wrought for success. 

I must add another, though without asking it to be 

taken into account just here. I must add it because, the 

more we consider it, the more we are likely to count it 

the heaviest handicap of all. All female parts were 

taken by boys. Reflect upon this, and listen to Lady 

Macbeth : 

I have given suck, and know 
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me: 
I would, while it was smiling in my face, 
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums. 
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you 
Have done to thia 

That in the mouth of a boy! Shakespeare^s triumph 
over this condition will remain a wonder, however closely 
it be studied. ITevertheless, there it was: a condition 
which, having to lay account with it, he magnificently 
over-rode. 

It were pedantic, of course, to lay upon a modem man 
the strain of constantly visualising that old theatre on the 
Bankside when reading Shakespeare, or, when seeing him 
acted, perpetually reminding himself, " Ho did not write 
it for this/* He did not, to be sure. But SiO potent was 



10 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

his genius that it has carried his work past the conditions 
of his own age to reincarnate, to revive, it in unabated 
vigour in later ages and under new conditions, even as 
the Iliad has survived the harp and the warriors' feast. 
This adaptable vitality is the test of first-rate genius ; and, 
save Shakespeare's, few dramas of the great Eliza- 
bethan age have passed it. But as for Shakespeare, I 
verily believe that, could his large masculine spirit revisit 
London, it would — ^whatever the dilettante and the su- 
perior person may say — rejoice in what has been done to 
amplify that cage against which we have his own word 
that he fretted, and would be proud of the care his coun- 
trymen, after three centuries, take to interpret him 
worthily : and this although I seem to catch, together with 
a faint smell of brimstone, his comments on the ' star ' 
performer of these daj^s, with the limelight following him 
about the stage and analysing the rainbow upon his glit- 
tering eye. These things, however, Shakespeare could not 
foresee: and we must seek back to the limitations of his 
theatre for our present purpose, to understand what a 
workman he was. 

(2) 

We pass, then, from the conditions under which he 
built his plays to the material out of which he had to 
build this particular one. The material of Macbeth, as 
we know, he found in Raphael Holinshed's Chroni- 
cles of Scotland, first published in 1578 (but he appears 
to have read the second edition, of 1587). It lies scat- 
tered about in various passages in the separate chronicles 
of King Duncan, King Duff, King Kenneth, King Mac- 



MACBETH 11 

beth; but we get the gist of it in two passages from the 
Chronicle of King Duncan. There is no need to quote 
them in full: but the purport of the first may be gath- 
ered from its opening: — 

Shortly after happened a strange and uncouth wonder. ... It 
fortuned as Macbeth and Banquho journeyed towards Fores, where 
the king as then lay, they went sporting by the way together without 
other companie save only themselves, passing through the woodes 
and fieldes, when sodenly, in the middes of a launde, there met them 
3 women in strange and ferly apparell, resembling creatures of an 
elder wo ride; whom they attentively behelde, wondering much at 
the sight. 

Then follow the prophecies: "All hajle, Makbeth, 
Thane of Glammis," etc., with the promise to Banquho 
that " contrarily thou in deede shall not reigne at all, but 
of thee shall be borne which shall governe the Scottish 
Kingdome by long order of continuall descent." I pause 
on that for a moment, merely because it gives a reason, 
if a secondary one, why the story should attract Shake- 
speare: for James I, a descendant of Banquho, had come 
to be King of England. Actors and playwrights have 
ever an eye for ' topical ' opportunity, and value that op- 
portunity none the less if it be one to flatter a reigning 
house. 

I take up the quotation at a later point : — 

The same night at supper Banquho jested with him and sayde, 
Nowe Makbeth thou hast obtayned those things which the two 
former sisters prophesied, there remayneth onely for thee to pur- 
chase that which the thyrd sayd should come to passe. Whereupon 
Makbeth, revolving the thing in his mind even then, began to 
devise how he mighte attayne to the kingdome. 

!N'ext we read that Duncan, by appointing his young 
son, Malcolm, Prince of Cumberland, " as it were thereby 



12 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

to appoint him his successor in the Kingdome," sorely 
troubled Macbeth's ambition, insomuch that he now be- 
gan to think of usurping the kingdom by force, The 
Chronicle goes on: — 

The wordes of the three weird sisters also (of whome before ye 
have heard) greatly encouraged him hereunto, but specially his wife 
lay sore upon him to attempt the thing, as she that was very am- 
bitious, burning in unquenchable desire to beare the name of a 
Queene. At length, therefore, communicating his proposed intent 
with his trustie friendes, amongst whom Banquho was the chiefest, 
upon confidence of their promised ayde, he slewe the king at 
Envernes (or as some say at Botgosuane) in the VI year of his 
reygne. 

The Chronicle proceeds to tell how Macbeth had him- 
self crowned at Scone; how he reigned (actually for a 
considerable time) ; how he got rid of Banquho ; how 
Banquho's son escaped; how Birnam Wood came to 
Dunsinane, with much more that is handled in the 
tragedy; and ends (so far as we are concerned) as the 
play ends: — 

But Makduffe . . . answered (with his naked sworde in his 
hande) saying: it is true, Makbeth, and now shall thine insatiable 
crueltie have an ende, for I am even he that thy wysards have tolde 
thee of, who was never borne of my mother, but ripped out of her 
wombe: therewithall he stept unto him, and slue him in the place. 
Then cutting his heade from the shoulders, he set it upon a poll, 
and brought it into Malcolme. This was the end of Makbeth, after 
he had reigned XVII years over the Scottishmen. In the beginning 
of his raigne he accomplished many worthie actes, right profitable 
to the common wealth (as ye have heard), but afterwards, by 
illusion of the Divell, he defamed the same with most horrible 
crueltie. 

There, in brief, we have Shakespeare's material: and 
patently it holds one element on which an artist's mind 



MACBETH 13 

(if I imderstand the artistic mind) would by attraction 
at once inevitably seize. I mean the element of the super- 
natural. It is the element which almost every com- 
mentator, almost every critic, has done his best to belittle. 
I shall recur to it, and recur with stress upon it j because, 
writing as diffidently as a man may who has spent thirty 
years of his life in learning to understand how stories 
are begotten, and being old enough to desire to communi- 
cate what of knowledge, though too late for me, may yet 
profit others, I can make affidavit that what first arrested 
Shakespeare's mind as he read the Chronicles was that 
passage concerning the " three weird sisters " — " All hail, 
Macbeth, Thane of Glamis ! " and the rest. 

Let us consider the Chronicle with this supernatural 
element left out, and what have we ? — ^An ordinary sordid 
story of a disloyal general murdering his king, usurping 
the throne, reigning with cruelty for seventeen years, and 
being overcome at length amid every one's approval. 
There is no material for tragedy in that. " Had Zimri 
peace, who slew his master?" — ^Well (if we exclude the 
supernatural in the Chronicle) , yes, he had ; and for seven- 
teen years: which, for a bloody tyrant, is no short run. 

Still, let us exclude the supernatural for a moment. 
Having excluded it, we shall straightway perceive that 
the story of the Chronicle has one fatal defect as a theme 
of tragedy. For tragedy demands some sympathy with 
the fortunes of its hero : but where is there room for sym- 
pathy in the fortunes of a disloyal, self-seeking murderer ? 

Just there lay Shakespeare's capital difficulty. 



14 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

(3) 

Before we follow his genius in coming to grips with it, 
let us realise the importance as well as the magnitude of 
that difficulty. " Tragedy [says Aristotle] is the imita- 
tion of an action: and an action implies personal agents, 
who necessarily possess certain qualities both of character 
and thought. It is these that determine the qualities of 
actions themselves : these — thought and character — are the 
two natural causes from which actions spring: on these 
causes, again, all success or failure depends." * 

But it comes to this — The success or failure of a 
tragedy depends on what sort of person we represent, 
and principally, of course, on what sort of person we 
make our chief tragic figure, our protagonist. Every- 
thing depends really on our protagonist: and it was his 
true critical insight that directed Dr. Bradley, examining 
the substance of Shakespearian tragedy, to lead off with 
these words: 

Such a tragedy brings before us a considerable number of 
persons (many more than the persons in a Greek play, unless the 
members of the Chorus are reckoned among them) ; but it is pre- 
eminently the story of one person, the ' hero,' or at most of two, the 
* hero ' and ' heroine.' Moreover, it is only in the love-tragedies, 
Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, that the heroine is as 
much the centre of the action as the hero. The rest, including 
Macbeth, are single stars. So that, having noticed the peculiarity 
of these two dramas, we may henceforth, for the sake of brevity, 
ignore it, and may speak of the tragic story as being concerned 
primarily with one person. 

* I quote from Butcher's rendering, which gives the sense clearly 
enough; though, actually, Aristotle's language is simpler, and for 
" thought " I should substitute " understanding " as a translation of 

6idvoia. 



MACBETH 15 

So, it makes no difference to this essential of tragedy 
whether we write our play for an audience of Athenians 
or of Londoners gathered in the Globe Theatre, South- 
wark: whether we crowd our dramatis personce or 
are content with a cast of three or four. There must be 
one central figure (or at most two), and on this figure, 
as the story unfolds itself, we must concentrate the 
spectators' emotions of pity or terror, or both. 

'Now, I must, for handiness, quote Aristotle again, 
because he lays down very succinctly some rules con- 
cerning this ' hero ' or protagonist, or central figure 
(caU him what we will — I shall use the word ' hero ' 
merely because it is the shortest). But let us under- 
stand that though these so-called ' rules ' of Aristotle are 
marvellously enforced — though their wisdom is marvel- 
lously confirmed — by Dr. Bradley's examination of the 
^ rules ' which Shakespeare, consciously or unconsciously, 
obeyed, they do no more than turn into precept, with rea- 
sons given, certain inductions drawn by Aristotle from 
the approved masterpieces of his time. There is no rea- 
son to suppose that Shakespeare had ever heard of them; 
rather, there is good reason to suppose that he had not. 

But Aristotle says this concerning the hero, or pro- 
tagonist, of tragic drama, and Shakespeare's practice at 
every point supports him: — 

(1) A Tragedy must not be the spectacle of a perfectly good 
man brought from prosperity to adversity. For this merely shocks 
us. 

(2) Nor, of course, must it be that of a bad man passing from 
adversity to prosperity: for that is not tragedy at all, but the 
perversion of tragedy, and revolts the moral sense. 

(3) Nor, again, should it exhibit the downfall of an utter villain: 



16 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

since pity ia aroused by undeserved misfortunes, terror by mis- 
fortunes befalling a man like ourselves. 

(4) There remains, then, as the only proper subject for Tragedy, 
the spectacle of a man not absolutely or eminently good or wise who 
is brought to disaster not by sheer depravity but by some error or 
frailty. 

(5) Lastly, this man must be highly renowned and prosperous— 
an (Edipus, a Thyestes, or some other illustrious person. 



Before dealing with the others, let us get this last 
rule out of the way; for, to begin with, it presents no 
diflSculty in Macbeth, since in the original — in Holin- 
shed's Chronicles — ^Macbeth is an illustrious warrior who 
makes himself a king; and moreover the rule is patently 
a secondary one, of artistic expediency rather than of 
artistic right or wrong. It amounts but to this, that 
the more eminent we make our persons in Tragedy, 
the more evident we make the disaster — the dizzier the 
height, the longer way to fall, and the greater shock 
on our audience's mind. Dr. Bradley goes further, and 
remarks, " The pangs of despised love and the anguish 
of remorse, we say, are the same in a peasant and a 
prince: but (not to insist that they cannot be so when 
the prince is really a prince) the story of the prince, the 
triumvir, or the general, has a greatness and dignity of 
its own. His fate affects the welfare of a whole; and 
when he falls suddenly from the height of earthly great- 
ness to the dust, his fall produces a sense of contrast, of 
the powerlessness of man, and of the omnipotence — per- 
haps the caprice — of Fortune or Fate, which no tale of 
private life can possibly rival." In this wider view Dr. 
Bradley may be right, though some modern dramatists 
would disagree with him. But we are dealing more hum- 



MACBETH 17 

bly witH Shakespeare as a worJcman; and for our pur- 
pose it is more economical, as well as sufficient, to say 
that downfall from a high eminence is more spectacular 
than downfall from a low one; that Shakespeare, who 
knew most of the tricks of his art, knew this as well as 
ever did Aristotle, and that those who adduce to us Shake- 
speare's constant selection of kings and princes for his 
dramatis personce as evidence of his having been a 
' snob,' might as triumphantly prove it snobbish in a 
Greek tragedian to write of Agamemnon and Clytem- 
nestra, or of Cadmus and Harmonia, because 

The gods had to their marriage come, 
And at the banquet all the Muses sang: 

But, touching the other and more essential rules laid 
down by Aristotle, let me, — ^very fearfully, knowing how 
temerarious it is, how impudent, to offer to condense so 
great and close a thinker, — suggest that, after all, they 
work down into one : — that a hero of Tragic Drama must, 
whatever else he miss, engage our sympathy; that, how- 
ever gross his error or grievous his frailty, it must not 
exclude our feeling that he is a man like ourselves ; that, 
sitting in the audience, we must know in our hearts that 
what is befalling him might conceivably in the circum- 
stances have befallen us, and say in our hearts, " There, 
but for the grace of God, go I." 

I think, anticipating a little, I can drive this point 
home by a single illustration. When the ghost of Banquo 
seats itself at that dreadful supper, who sees it? ISTot 
the company. Not even Lady Macbeth. Whom does 
it accuse? 'Not the company, and, again, not even Lady 



18 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Macbeth. Those who see it are Macbeth and you and I. 
Those into whom it strikes terror are Macbeth and you 
and I. Those whom it accuses are Macbeth and you and 
I. And what it accuses is what, of Macbeth, you and I 
are hiding in our own breasts. 

So, if this be granted, I come back upon the capital 
difficulty that faced Shakespeare as an artist. 

(1) It was not to make Macbeth a grandiose or a con- 
spicuous figure. He was already that in the Chronicle. 

(2) It was not to clothe him in something to illude 
us with the appearance of real greatness. Shakespeare, 
with his command of majestic poetical speech, had that 
in his work-bag surely enough, and knew it. When a 
writer can make an imaginary person talk like this : — 

She should have died hereafter; 

There would have been a time for such a word. 

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow 

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day 

To the last syllable of recorded time; 

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 

The way to dusty death — 

I say, when a man knows he can make his Macbeth talk 
like that, he needs not distrust his power to drape his 
Macbeth in an illusion of greatness. Moreover, Shake- 
speare — artist that he was — ^had other tricks up his 
sleeve to convince us of Macbeth's greatness. One of 
these I hope to discuss in a subsequent chapter. 

But (here lies the crux) how could he make us sym- 
pathise with him — ^make us, sitting or standing in the 
Globe Theatre some time (say) in the year 1610, feel that 

\ 



MACBETH 19 

.Macbeth was even such a man as you or I? He was a 
murderer, and a murderer for his private profit — a com- 
bination which does not appeal to most of us, to unlock 
the flood-gates of sympathy, or indeed (I hope) as strik- 
ing home upon any private and pardonable frailty. The 
Chronicle does, indeed, allow just one loop-hole for par- 
don. It hints that Duncan, nominating his boy to suc- 
ceed him, thereby cut off Macbeth from a reasonable hope 
of the crown, which he thereupon (and not until then) 
by process of murder usurped, " having," says Holinshed, 
" a juste quarrell so to do (as he took the mater)." 

Did Shakespeare use that one hint, enlarge that loop- 
hole? He did not. 

The more I study Shakespeare as an artist, the more 
I worship the splendid audacity of what he did, just here, 
in this play. 

Instead of using a paltry chance to condone Macbeth's 
guilt, he seized on it and plunged it threefold deeper, so 
that it might verily 

the multitudinous seas incarnadine. 

Think of it:— 

He made this man, a sworn soldier, murder Duncan, 
his liege-lord. 

He made this man, a host, murder Duncan, a guest 
within his gates. 

He made this man, strong and hale, murder Duncan, 
old, weak, asleep and defenceless. 

He made this man commit murder for nothing but his 
own advancement. 

He made this man murder Duncan, who had steadily 



20 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

advanced him hitherto, who had never been aught but 
trustful, and who (that no detail of reproach might be 
wanting) had that very night, as he retired, sent, in most 
kindly thought, the gift of a diamond to his hostess. 

To sum up: instead of extenuating Macbeth's crimi- 
nality, Shakespeare doubles and redoubles it. Delib- 
erately this magnificent artist locks every door on con- 
donation, plunges the guilt deep as hell, and then — tucks 
up his sleeves. 

There was once another man, called John Milton, 
a Cambridge man of Christ's College; and, as most 
of us know, he once thought of rewriting this very 
story of Macbeth. The evidence that he thought of it — 
the entry in Milton's handwriting — may be examined in 
the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. 

Milton did not eventually write a play on the story of 
Macbeth. Eventually he preferred to write an epic upon 
the Fall of Man, and of that poem critics have been found 
to say that Satan, " enemy of mankind," is in fact the 
hero and the personage that most claims our sympathy. 

"Now (stiU bearing in mind how the subject of Macbeth 
attracted Milton) let us open Paradise Lost at Book IV 
upon the soliloquy of Satan, which between lines 32-113 
admittedly holds the clou of the poem: 

0! thou that, with surpassing glory crown'd — 

Still thinking of Shakespeare and of Milton — of Satan 
and of Macbeth — ^let us ponder every line: but espe- 
cially these: — 



MACBETH 21 

Lifted up so high, 
I 'sdain'd subjection, and thought one step higher 
Would set me highest, and in a moment quit 
The debt immense of endless gratitude. 
So burdensome, still paying, still to owe: 
Forgetful what from him I still receiv'd; 
And understood not that a grateful mind 
By owing owes not, but still pays, at once 
Indebted and discharg'd. . . . 

'And yet more especially this: — 

Farewell, remorse! All good to me is lost: 
Evil, be thou my good. 



CHAPTER II 
MACBETH 

n 

The criminal hero — Hallucination — What is witchcraft? — ^Dr. 
Johnson on the witches in Macbeth — " Evil, be thou my good " — ^The 
use of darkness and its suggestions, in Shakespeare's tragedies — 
Schiller and Schlegel — Vagueness of the witches — " A deed without 
a name" — Deliberate enfeebling of all characters, save in the two 
protagonists — The critical word in this drama — The knocking at 
the gate. 

(1) 

We left off upon the question, How could it lie within 
the compass even of Shakespeare, master-workman though 
he was and lord of all noble persuasive language, to make 
a tragic hero of this Macbeth — traitor to his king, mur- 
derer of his sleeping guest, breaker of most sacred trust, 
ingrate, self-seeker, false kinsman, perjured soldier? 
Why, it is sin of this quality that in Hamlet, for example, 
outlaws the guilty wretch beyond range of pardon — of 
our pardon, if not of God's. 

Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole. . .- ••• 

Why, so did Macbeth upon Duncan's. Hear the wretch 
himself on his knees : 

Forgive me my foul murder? 
That cannot be; since I am still posaess'd 
Of those effects for which I did the murder. . . . 
22 



MACBETH 23 

Why, so was Macbeth again. 

O bosom black as death! 
O limfid soul, that, struggling to be free, 
Art more engag'd! 

How could Shakespeare make his audience feel pity or 
terror for such a man? — not for the deed, not for Dun- 
can; but for Macbeth, doer of the deed? how make them 
sympathise, saying inwardly, " There, but for the grace 
of God, might you go, or I " ? 

He could, by majesty of diction, make them feel that 
Macbeth was somehow a great man: and this he did. He 
could conciliate their sympathy at the start by presenting 
Macbeth as a brave and victorious soldier: and this he 
did. He could show him drawn to the deed, against will 
and conscience, by persuasion of another, a woman: and 
this — though it is extremely dangerous, since all submis- 
sion of will forfeits something of manliness, lying ap- 
parently on the side of cowardice, and ever so little of 
cowardice forfeits sympathy — this, too, Shakespeare did. 
He could trace the desperate act to ambition, "last in- 
firmity of noble minds " : and this again he did. All 
these artifices, and more, Shakespeare used. But yet are 
they artifices and little more. They do not begin — they 
do not pretend — ^to surmount the main difficulty which 
I have indicated. How of such a criminal to make a 
hero? 

Shakespeare did it: sdlulum est agendo. How? 

There is (I suppose) only one possible way. It is to 
make our hero — supposed great, supposed brave, supposed 
of certain winning natural gifts — proceed to his crime 



24. SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

under some fatal hallucination. It must not be an hal- 
lucination of mere madness: for that merely revolts. 
In our treatment of lunatics we have come to be far ten- 
derer than the Elizabethans. (We recall Malvolio in the 
dark cellar.) Still, to us madness remains unaccountable; 
a human breakdown, out of which anything may happen. 
!N"o: the hallucination, the dreadful mistake, must be one 
that can seize on a mind yet powerful and lead it logically 
to a doom that we, seated in the audience, understand, 
awfully forebode, yet cannot arrest — unless by breaking 
through the whole illusion heroically, as did a young 
woman of my acquaintance who, on her second or third 
visit to the theatre, arose from her seat in the gallery and 
shouted to Othello, " Oh, you great black fool ! Can't 
you see.'" 

Further, such an hallucination once established upon 
a strong mind, the more forcibly that mind reasons the 
more desperate will be the conclusion of its error; the 
more powerful the will, or combination of wills, the more 
irreparable will be the deed to which it drives; as with 
the more anguish we shall follow the once-noble soul step 
by step to its ruin. 

Now, of all forms of human error, which is the most 
fatal? Surely that of exchanging Moral Order, Right- 
eousness, the Will of God (call it what we will) for 
something directly opposed to it: in other words, of 
assigning the soul to Satan's terrible resolve, "Evil, be 
thou my good." 

By a great soul such a resolve cannot be taken save 
under delusion. But if Shakespeare could fix that 
hallucination upon Macbeth and plausibly establish him 



MACBETH 25 

in it, he held the key to unlock his difficulty. I have no 
doubt at all where he found it, or how he grasped it. 

(2) 

What is Witchcraft? Or first let us ask, What was 
Witchcraft ? 

Well, to begin with, it was something in which the 
mass of any given audience in the Globe Theatre de- 
voutly believed; and of the educated few less than one 
in ten, perhaps, utterly disbelieved. I shall not here en- 
quire if Shakespeare believed in it ; or, if at all, how far : 
but if Shakespeare did utterly disbelieve when he wrote 
(if he wrote) the First Part of Henry VI, then it adds 
— what we could thankfully spare — one more feature of 
disgrace to his treatment of Joan of Arc. 

Women were burnt for witches in Shakespeare's time, 
and throughout the seventeenth century, and some way on 
into the eighteenth. We may read (and soon have our 
fill) in the pious abominable works of Cotton and Increase 
Mather of what these poor women suffered publicly, in 
New England and Massachusetts, at the hands of Puritan 
Fathers. We may find in Sinclair's Satan's Invisible 
World Discovered more than any Christian should bar- 
gain for concerning our home-grown beldames, and 
specially those of Scotland. To go right back to Shake- 
speare's time, we may study the prevalent, almost gen- 
eral, belief in Reginald Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft 
(1584). To the Elizabethans witchcraft was an accepted 
thing: their drama reeks of it. We need only call to mind 
Marlowe's Faustus, Greene's Friar Bacon, Middleton's 
WitcJi, Dekker's Witch of Edmonton, 



26 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

I shall not labour this, because it has been seized on 
by Dr. Johnson with his usual straight insight and ex- 
pounded with his usual common sense. This play of 
Macbeth peculiarly attracted him. In 1745, long before 
he annotated the complete Shakespeare, he put forth a 
pamphlet entitled Miscellaneous Observations on the 
Tragedy of Macbeth, with BemarJcs on Sir T. E.'s (Sir 
Thomas Hanraer's) Edition of Shalcespeare, To that 
pamphlet (says Boswell) he aflSxed proposals for a new 
edition of his own: and though no copy survives which 
contains them, he had certainly advertised his intention 
somehow and somewhere. As all the world knows, twenty 
years elapsed before, in October 1Y65, his constitutional 
lethargy at length overcome, there appeared his edition 
of Shakespeare in eight volumes. 

ISTow what has Johnson to tell us of this his favourite 
play? 

He begins on Act i. Scene 1, line 1— nay, before it: 
on the stage direction, " Enter Three Witches." Says he: 

In order to make a true estimate of the abilities and merits 
of a writer, it is always necessary to examine the spirit of his age 
and the opinions of his contemporaries. A poet who should now 
make the whole action of his tragedy depend upon enchantment, 
and produce the chief events by the assistance of supernatural 
spirits, would be censored as transgressing the bounds of probability, 
be banished from the Theatre to the nursery, and condemned to 
write fairy-tales instead of tragedies. 

Here I submit that Johnson talks too loudly. I may 
not actually believe in Jove or Apollo or "Venus, " mother 
of the -i5]neid race divine," any more than I believe in 
Puck or in Oberon, or in ghosts as vulgarly conceived. 
Yet Jove, Apollo, and Venus remain for me symbols of 



MACBETH 27 

things in which I do firmly and even passionately believe : 
of things for which neither Christian doctrine nor mod- 
em ]^atural Science provides me with symbols that are 
equivalent or even begin to be comparable. Tradition has 
consecrated them : and an author to-day may invoke these 
names of gods once authentic — as an author to-day may 
employ ghosts, fairies, even witches — to convey a spiritual 
truth, without being suspected by any one, not a fool, of 
literal belief in his machinery, of practising Walpurgis 
dances in his closet or drenching his garden at night with 
the blood of black goats. 

But a survey [proceeds Johnson] of the notions that pre- 
vailed at the time when this play was written, will prove that 
Shakespeare was in no danger of such censors, since he only turned 
the system that was then universal to his advantage, and was far 
from overburthening the credulity of his audience. 

Some learned observations follow, on the Dark Ages and 
their credence in witchcraft; among which is introduced 
a story from Olympiodorus, of a wizard, one Libanius, 
who promised the Empress Placidia to defeat her enemies 
without aid of soldiery, and was promptly on his promise 
put to death by that strong-minded lady: ''who," adds 
Johnson, " shewed some kindness in her anger, by cut- 
ting him off at a time so convenient for his reputation." 

He continues : — 

The Reformation did not immediately arrive at its meridian, and 
tho' day was gradually increasing upon us, the goblins of witch- 
craft still continued to hover in the twilight. In the time of Queen 
Elizabeth was the remarkable trial of the witches of Warbois, 
whose conviction is still commemorated in an annual sermon at 
Huntingdon. But in the reign of King James, in which this tragedy 
was written, many circumstances concurred to propagate and con- 



/ 



28 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

firm this opinion. The King, who was much celebrated for his 
knowledge, had, before his arrival in England, not only examined in 
person a woman accused of witchcraft, but had given a very formal 
account of the practices and illusions of evil spirits, the compacts of 
witches, the ceremonies used by them, the manner of detecting them, 
and the justice of punishing them, in his Dialogues of Dcemonologie, 
written in the Scottish dialect, and published at Edinburgh. This 
book was, soon after his accession, reprinted at London, and as the 
ready way to gain King James's favour was to flatter his specula- 
tions, the system of Dcemonologie was immediately adopted by all 
who desired either to gain preferment or not to lose it. Thus the 
doctrine of witchcraft was very powerfully inculcated ; and as the 
greatest part of mankind have no other reason for their opinions 
than that they are in fashion, it cannot be doubted but this per- 
suasion made a rapid progress, since vanity and credulity co-operated 
in its favour. The infection soon reached the parliament, who in 
the first year of King James, made a law by which it was enacted, 
chap, xii, that " if any person shall use any invocation or conjuration 
of any evil or wicked spirit; 2, or shall consult, covenant with, 
entertain, employ, feed or reward any evil or cursed spirit to or 
for any intent or purpose; 3, or take up any dead man, woman or 
child out of the grave — or the skin, bone, or any part of the dead 
person — to be employed or used in any manner of witchcraft, sorcery, 
charm, or enchantment; 4, or shall use, practise or exercise any sort 
of witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or enchantment; 5, whereby any 
person shall be destroyed, killed, wasted, consumed, pined, or lamed 
in any part of the body; 6, that every such person being convicted 
shall suffer death." This law was repealed in our own time. 

Thus, in the time of Shakespeare, was the doctrine of witchcraft 
at once established by law and by the fashion, and it became not 
only unpolite, but criminal, to doubt it. 

Upon this general infatuation Shakespeare might be easily al- 
lowed to found a play, especially since he has followed with great 
exactness such histories as were then thought true; nor can it be 
doubted that the scenes of enchantment, however they may now be 
ridiculed, were both by himself and his audience thought awful and 
affecting. 

Thus wrote Johnson in the middle of the eighteenth 
century, " the age of reason " ; and, assuming that he 
talks sense, I put the further, more important question: 



MACBETH 29 

" What is, or was, Witchcraft ? " " What did men hold it, 
essentially and precisely, to mean ? " 

It meant, essentially and precisely, that the person who 
embraced witchcraft sold his soul to the Devil, to become 
his servitor; that, for a price, he committed himself to 
direct reversal of the moral order; that he consented to 
say, " Evil, be thou my good." " Satan, be thou my 
God." It meant this, and nothing short of this. 

!N'ow let us return to Holinshed. The Chronicle re- 
lates that Macbeth and Banquo " went sporting by the 
way together without other companie save only them- 
selves, passing the woodes and fieldes, when sodenly, in 
the middes of a launde there met them 3 women in 
strange and ferly apparell, resembling creatures of an 
elder world " : and it adds that by common opinion these 
women " were eyther the weird sisters, that is (as ye 
would say) y® Goddesses of destinee, or else some 
Nimphes or Eaieries." I have already announced my 
readiness to make affidavit that Shakespeare's mind, as he 
read, seized on this passage at once. Eollowing this up, 
I will suggest (as a diversion, rather apparent than real, 
from my main argument) a process — rough indeed, yet 
practical — by which a dramatist's mind would operate. 

He would say to himself, " I have to treat of a murder ; 
which is, of its nature, a deed of darkness. Here to my 
hand is a passage which, whether I can find or not in it 
the motive of my drama, already drapes it in the super- 
natural, and so in mystery, which is next door to dark- 
ness." 

Let us pause here and remind ourselves how constantly 



30 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Shakespeare uses darkness to aid his effect of his tragedies 
upon the spectator. To omit Borneo and Juliet — of 
which the tragic action really starts under a moonlit 
balcony and ends in a vaulted tomb, — of the four 
tragedies by general consent preferred as greatest, Ham- 
let opens on the dark battlements of Elsinore, with a 
colloquy in whispers, such as night constrains, between 
sentinels who report a ghost visiting their watch: Othello 
opens with the mutter of voices in a dark street, and ends 
by the bedside lit by one candle: the total impression of 
Lear is of a dark heath upon which three or four men 
wander blindly, lit only at intervals by flashes from the 
cope of night; and the physical blindness of Kent (the 
one morally sane character in the piece) enhances our 
sense of impotent moral groping. Of Macheth I cannot 
do better than quote Dr. Bradley : — 

Darkness, we may even say blackness, broods over this tragedy. 
It is remarkable that almost all the scenes which at once recur to 
the memory take place either at night or in some dark spot. The- 
vision of the dagger, the murder of Duncan, the murder of Banquo, 
the sleep-walking of Lady Macbeth, all come in night-scenes. The 
witches dance in the thick air of a storm, or " black and midnight 
hags " receive Macbeth in a cavern. The blackness of night is to 
the hero a thing of fear, even of horror; and that which he feela 
becomes the spirit of the play. The faint glimmerings of the 
western sky at twilight are here menacing: it is the hour when the 
traveller hastens to reach safety in his inn, and when Banquo rides 
homeward to meet his assassins : the hour when " light thickens," 
when "night's black agents to their prey do rouse," when the wolf 
begins to howl, and the owl to scream, and withered murder steals 
forth to his work. Macbeth bids the stars hide their fires that his 
"black" desires may be concealed: Lady Macbeth calls on thick night 
to come, palled in the dunnest smoke of hell. The moon is down 
and no stars shine when Banquo, dreading the dreams of the coming 
night, goes unwillingly to bed, and leaves Macbeth to wait for the 
summons of the little bell. When the next day should dawn, its 



MACBETH 31 

light is " strangled " and " darkness does the face of earth entomb." 
In the whole drama the sun seems to shine only twice: first, in the 
beautiful but ironical passage where Duncan sees the swallows flit- 
ting round the castle of death; and afterwards, when at the close 
the avenging army gathers to rid the earth of its shame. Of the 
many slighter touches which deepen this effect I notice only one. 
The failure of nature in Lady Macbeth is marked by her fear of 
darkness; " she has light by her continually." And in the one phrase 
of fear that escapes her lips even in sleep, it is of the darkness of 
the place of torment that she speaks. 

"Hell is murkj." Yes, and upon the crucial test of 
the guilty king's soul in Hamlet — the play-scene — ^what is 
the cry? 

King. Give me some light — away! 
All. Lights, lights, lights! 

What, again, is the scene that gives quality to Julius 
CcBsar but the brooding night in Brutus' garden ? What, 
again (to go back among the plays), retrieves The Mer- 
chant of Venice from, tragedy — from the surcharged air 
of the trial scene — to comedy, but the fifth Act, with 
placid night shimmering towards dawn, and the birds 
starting to sing in the shrubberies as Portia, mistress of 
the house and the play, says in four words what con- 
cludes all — 

It is almost morning. 

It may well be that Shakespeare, as a stage-manager, 
had means of employing darkness at will, say by a cur- 
tain pulled overhead across the auditorium, or part of it. 
If he had not — and the first account of the play by a spec- 
tator is by one Dr. Forman, an astrologer, who paid for 
his seat in the Globe on Saturday, April 20th, 1610 — 
that is, at a time of year when the sky over the theatre 



32 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

would be day-lit — I frankly confess my ignorance of how 
it was managed. But that Shakespeare saw the play in 
darkness no one who has studied it can have any doubt at 
aU. 

He saw the whole thing in darkness, or at best in the 
murk light of the Scottish highlands. He saw it (as the 
play proves) a thing of night. iNow, always and everlast- 
ingly, amongst men, as day typifies sight and sanity, 
night typifies blindness and evil. In the night-time mur- 
der stalks, witches ride, men doubt of God in their 
dreams — doubt even, lying awake — and wait for dawn to 
bring reassurance. 

In darkness — in a horror of darkness only — can one 
mistake and purchase evil for good. 

So, as I reason, Shakespeare saw his chance. I am 
weary, and over-weary, of commentators who dispute 
whether his witches were real witches or fates or what- 
not. Schiller, as all know, adapted Macbeth; and 
Schiller was a poet : but Schiller was no Shakespeare, and 
by philosophising Shakespeare's witches, as by other 
means, he produced a Macbeth remarkably unlike Shake- 
speare's Macbeth. Why, when he came to the knocking at 
the gate, Schiller omitted the Porter — in deference (I be- 
lieve) to the genteel taste of his age — and substituted a 
Watchman, with a song to the rising dawn ; and a charm- 
ing song, too, with the one drawback that it ruins the 
great dramatic moment of the play. Schlegel rates 
Schiller roundly for his witches; and Gervinus says that 
Schlegel's censure is not a half-pennyworth too harsh. 
But Schlegel proceeds to evolve out of his inner conscious- 
ness a new kind of witch of his own : and this too has the 



MACBETH 33 

merit of being a witch of Schlegel's own with the defect of 
being as much like Shakespeare's as any other camel. 
Thereupon starts up Gervinus, and says that Schlegel 
" gives throughout an opposite idea of Shakespeare's 
meaning"; and forthwith proceeds in his turn to evolve 
his camel, having started off with the observation that 
" the poet, in the actual text of the play, calls these be- 
ings ' witches ' only derogatorily : they call themselves 
weird sisters." Profoundly true! — and has any one, by 
the way, ever known a usurer who called himself a 
usurer, or a receiver of stolen goods who called himself 
a receiver, or a pandar who called himself a pandar, or a 
swindler who called himself anything but " a victim of 
circumstances " ? A few days ago, some enterprising 
firm sent me a letter which began (as I thought with 
gratuitous abruptness) " We are not money-lenders " — 
and went on to suggest that if, however, I should need 
" temporary financial accommodation," they were pre- 
pared to advance any sum between £5 and £50,000. 

Why, as everybody knows who has studied the etiquette 
of traffic with Satan, it is the rule never to mention names. 
If Professor Gervinus had never, to ponder it, studied the 
tale of RumpelstiltsJcin, he might at any rate have remem- 
bered the answer given to Macbeth's salutation and the 
answer in Act iv. Scene 1 : — 

Macbeth. How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags! 

What is't you do? 
All. A deed without a name. 

— and if the deed be nameless, why not the doer ? But — ^if 
the reader insist on my being definite — ^when a lady wears 
a beard on her chin, and sails to Aleppo in a sieve, and sits 



34f SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

at midnight boiling a ragout of poisoned entrails, newt's 
eyes, frog's toes, liver of blaspheming Jew, nose of Turk 
and Tartar's lips, finger of birth-strangled babe, to make 
a gruel thick and slab for a charm of powerful trouble — 
I say, if he insist on my giving that lady a name, I for 
one am content with that given in the stage-direction, 
and to call her " witch." 

But if these philosophising critics would leave their 
talk about N'orthern Fates, !N"orns, Valkyries — ^beings of 
which it is even possible that, save for the hint in Holin- 
shed, Shakespeare had never heard, and certain that not 
one in ten of the Globe audience had ever heard — and 
would turn their learned attention to what Shakespeare as, 
a workman had to do, could they miss seeing that a part 
of his very secret of success lay in leaving these creatures 
vague, the full extent of their influence dreadfully inde- 
terminate ? Coleridge on this, as not seldom, has the 
right word: — 

The Weird Sisters are as true a creation of Shakespeare's as his 
Ariel and Caliban — fates, furies, and materialising witches being the 
elements. They are wholly different from any representation of 
witches in the contemporary writers, and yet presented a sufficient 
external resemblance to the creattires of vulgar prejudice to act 
inunediately on the audience. Their character consists in the im- 
aginative disconnected from the good; they are the shadowy obscure 
and fearfully anomalous of physical nature, the lawless of human 
nature — elemental avengers without sex or kin. 

"Fair is foul, and foul is fair; 
Hover through the fog and filthy air." 

I will put it in another way. Suppose that Shake- 
speare as a workman had never improved on what Mar- 
lowe taught. Suppose, having to make Macbeth choose 



MACBETH 35 

evil for good, lie had introduced Satan, definite, incarnate, 
as Marlowe did : suppose he had made the man assign his 
soul, by deed of gift, on a piece of parchment and sign 
it with his blood, as Marlowe made Faustus do. What 
sort of play would Macbeth be ? 

But we know, and Shakespeare has helped to teach us, 
that the very soul of horror lies in the vague, the im- 
palpable: that nothing in the world or out of it can so 
daunt and cow us as the dread of we Jcnow not what. Of 
darkness, again, — of such darkness as this tragedy is cast 
in — that its menace lies in suggestion of the hooded eye 
watching us, the hand feeling to clutch us by the hair. 
No; Shakespeare knew what he was about, when he left 
his witches vague. 

Can we not see that very vagueness operating on Mac- 
beth's soul ? For a certainty, standing near in succession 
to the throne, he has, before ever the action begins, let 
his mind run on his chances. We need not say, with 
Coleridge, that " he who wishes a temporal end for itself 
does in truth will the means," but at least Macbeth has 
let his mind toy with the means. He has been on the 
stage scarce two minutes when, at the Third Witch's 
salutation — " All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king here- 
after " — he starts, 

betrayed by what is false within.' 

'" Grood sir," says Banquo, 

why do you start, and seem to fear 
Things that do sound so fair? - 

If we read and ponder Macbeth's letter to his wife; if 
we read and ponder what they say — yes, and specially 



36 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

ponder what they omit to say — when she greets his re- 
turn; we see beyond shadow of doubt that certain things 
are understood between them. They had talked of the 
chance, even if, until this moment, they had forborne to 
speak of the way to it. These are things which, until 
the necessary moment arrives — ^the moment that summons 
action, now or never — cannot be uttered aloud, even be- 
tween husband and wife. 

Let us pause here, on the brink of the deed, and sum- 
marise : 

(1) Shakespeare, as artificer of this play, meant the 
Witches with their suggestions to be of capital impor- 
tance. 

(2) Shakespeare, as a workman, purposely left vague 
the extent of their influence ; purposely left vague the pro- 
portions their influence and Macbeth's own guilty prompt- 
ings, his own acceptance of the hallucination, contribute 
to persuade him; vague as the penumbra about him in 
which — for he is a man of imagination — ^he sees that 
visionary dagger. Eor (let us remember) it is not on 
Macbeth alone that this horrible dubiety has to be. pro- 
duced; but on us also, seated in the audience. We see 
what he does not, and yearn to warn him; but we also 
see what he sees — the dagger, Banquo's ghost — and under- 
stand why he doubts. 

(3) As witchcraft implies a direct reversal of the 
moral order, so the sight and remembrance of the Witches, 
with the strange fulfilment of the Second Witch's 
prophecy, constantly impose the hallucination upon him 
— " Fair is foul, and foul is fair." " Evil, be thou my 
good." 



MACBETH 37 

(3) 

And now let us mark the daring of the great workman ! 
So far he has carefully piled up shadows, doubts, darkness, 
half-meanings upon the distraught mind of Macbeth. 
Now, of a sudden, he confronts him with a will that has 
no doubts at all, but is all for evil: this is his wife, his 
" dearest partner of greatness." She, poor soul, is to suf- 
fer hereafter: but for the moment she sees the way — 
which is the evil way — with absolute conviction. May 
I, without undue levity, illustrate her clearness of pur- 
pose by this comparison ? — 

"Dearest Emma," (wrote a young lady) "you will congratulate 
me when I tell you that Papa has this morning been offered the 

Bishopric of . It was quite unexpected. He is even now in the 

library, asking for guidance. Dear Mamma is upstairs, packing." 

So before the first Act closes — for actually, though 
our reluctant horror drags upon it, the action moves with 
a curious (nay, for an Elizabethan drama, with a singu- 
lar) rapidity — the hallucination is established, the scene 
is set, and we behold this man and this woman groping 
their road to certain doom. So cunningly has Shake- 
speare, to heighten our interest in these, flattened down 
the other figures in the drama that none of them 
really matters to us. Duncan's murder matters, but not 
Duncan. He sleeps, and anon after life's fitful fever 
he is to sleep well: but the only fever ive feel burns or 
shivers in that tremendous pair. The thick walls of In- 
verness Castle fence in the stealthy, damnable work. 
The gate is closed, barred. Around and outside broods 
darkness; yet even this is aware of something monstrous 
at work within. An owl screams : " there's husbandry in 



38 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

heaven" : the stars, " as troubled by man's act," dare but 
peer through it as through slits in a covering blanket : in 
the stables the horses catch a panic and gnaw each other's 
flesh in their madness. For within, up the stair, past the 
snoring grooms, a murderer creeps to his deed, a woman 
prompting. In part, no doubt — ^mostly, if we will — ^them- 
selves have betrayed themselves: but the powers of evil 
have their way, and reign in that horrible house. 

So ! and so — when it is done — as Lady Macbeth takes 
the dagger and Macbeth still stares at his bloody hands, 
the hour strikes and the word is spoken. 

What word ? It is the critical word of the drama : and 
yet no voice utters it. As befits the inhuman, impalpable, 
enclosing darkness, it is no articulate word at all. What 
is it ? 

It is this: — Knock! JcnocJc! hnock! JcnocTc! 

A knocking at the gate^ — ^but who knocks ? Can we sup- 
pose it is Macduff or Lennox? Who cares more than a 
farthing for Macduff? Who cares even less than a far- 
thing for Lennox ? 

Then who is it — or, shall I say, what is it — stands 
without, on the other side of the gate, in the breaking 
dawn, clamouring to be admitted ? What hand is on the 
hammer? Whose step on the threshold? 

It is, if we will, God. It is, if we will, the Moral 
Order. It is, whatever be our religion, that which holds 
humankind together by law of sanity and righteousness. 
It is all that this man and this woman have outraged. 
It is daylight, revealing things as they are and evil dif- 
ferent from good. It is the tread of vengeance, pede 
claudo, marching on the house. Macbeth is king, or is to 



MACBETH 39 

be. But that knock insists on what his soul now begins 
to know, too surely. Evil is not good; and from this 
moment the moral order asserts itself to roll back the 
crime to its last expiation. 

'Knock, Tcnock! " Here's a knocking indeed ! " growls 
the Porter as he tumbles out. " If a man were porter of 
hell-gate he should have old turning the key. ..." 
Ay, my good fellow: and that is precisely what you are! 



X" 



I 



CHAPTER III 
MACBETH 

III 

De Quincey on the knocking at the gate — Dramatic effect of the 
' closed door ' — Inside and outside — The porter — ' Flattening ' of 
minor characters — Banquo's part in the drama — The point of rest 
in art — Macduff, Lady Macduff, and the child — Lady Macbeth and 
the broken spring — Tragic ' irony ' — Peculiar ' irony ' of Macbeth 
— ^Relation of this play to Greek tragedy — Its greatness. 

(1) 

We have examined at some length the means by which 
Shakespeare overcame his main difficulty — that of recon- 
ciling Macbeth as hero or protagonist with the " deep 
damnation" of Duncan's taking-off. I do not think we 
have extenuated that damnation, as I am sure that Shake- 
speare has not extenuated it. Eather — to use a favourite 
word of Johnson's — he has ^ inspissated ' it, like a strong 
man glorying in his strength. If we can discover how, 
accepting the murder, and all the murder, he has forced 
us into terrified sympathy — into actual fellow-feeling — 
with the murderer, we hold the artistic secret of the drama. 

I propose in this third chapter to take some specimens of 
his workmanship in this play and attempt to show how ex- 
cellent it is in detail; not pretending to be exhaustive; 
choosing more or less at random from the heap of excel- 
lence, seeing that, in Dryden's phrase, " here is God's 
plenty." 

40 



MACBETH 41 

^Nevertheless let us preserve the semblance of good 
order by starting afresh just where we left off; — with the 
knocking at the gate. 

Imbedded in the works of De Quincey, like a prize in 
a bran-pie (the late William Ernest Henley used to call 
him, unjustly yet with some justice, " De Sawdust"), 
there is to be found a little paper six pages long, and 
prolix at that, which contains the last word of criticism 
on this knocking at the gate. 

De Quincey starts by confessing that " from his boyish 
days " this knocking produced an effect on his mind for 
which he could never account. " The effect was, that it 
reflected back upon the murderer a peculiar awfulness 
and depth of solemnity." He goes on to tell us (as he 
told us elsewhere, in his Murder Considered as One of 
the Fine Arts) how in the dreadful business of the mur- 
ders in the Katcliffe Highway — a series of crimes so 
fiendish that nothing like them again thrilled London un- 
til the days of Jack the Eipper — there did actually hap- 
pen what the genius of Shakespeare had invented two 
hundred years before. The murderer, one Williams, who 
had entered the house of the Marrs and locked the door 
behind him, was startled, right on the close of his bloody 
work, as he had butchered the last member of the family, 
by the knocking of a poor little servant-girl, the Marrs' 
maid-of-all-work, who had been sent out on an errand. 
De Quincey draws a wonderful picture of these two, one 
on either side of that thin street door, breathing close and 
listening: the little maid on the pavement, the stealthy 
devil in the passage, with his hand on the key, which, 
mercifully, he did not turn. 



42 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

And here let us note, in parenthesis, how fashionable 
this effect of the closed door has since become with 
dramatists. If we study Maeterlinck, for example, we 
shall find it his one master-trick. It is the whole secret 
of L'Intruse, of The Death of Tintagiles — the door 
with something dark, uncanny, foreboding, something that 
means doom, on the other side. Maeterlinck has variants, 
to be sure. In Les Aveugles he makes it the shutter of 
physical darkness in a company of old people, all blind. 
Sometimes, as in Interieur and Les Sept Princesses^ he 
rarefies the partition to a glass screen through which one 
set of characters, held powerless to interfere, watches 
another set unconscious of observation. But in one way 
or another always the dramatic effect hangs on our sense 
of this barrier, whether impalpable or solid, whether 
transparent as glass or dense as a door of oak, locked, 
bolted, barred. 

'Nov7 let De Quincey go on. In what happened to the 
Marrs' murderer he says he found the solution of what 
had always puzzled him — the effect wrought on his feel- 
ings by the knocking in Macbeth. A murderer — even 
such a murderer as a poet will condescend to — exhibits 
human nature in its most abject and humiliating atti- 
tude. Yet if, as in Macbeth, the murderer is to be the 
protagonist, upon him our interest must be thrown. But 
how? 

In Macbeth, for the sake of gratifying his own enormous and 
teeming faculty of creation, Shakespeare has introduced two mur- 
derers: and, as usual in his hands, they are remarkably dis- 
criminated; but, though in Macbeth the strife of mind is greater 
than in his wife, the tiger spirit not so awake, and his feelings 
caught chiefly by contagion from her — ^yet, as both were finally 



MACBETH 4-3 

involved in the guilt of murder, the murderous mind of necessity is 
finally to be presumed in both. This was to be expressed. . . . And, 
as this eflfect is marvellously accomplished in the dialogues and 
soliloquies themselves, so it is finally consummated by the expedient 
under consideration; and it is to this that I now solicit the reader's 
attention. If the reader has ever witnessed a wife, daughter, or 
sister in a fainting-fit, he may chance to have observed that the most 
afi"ecting moment in such a spectacle is that in which a sigh and 
a stirring announce the recommencement of suspended life. Or, if 
the reader has ever been present in a vast metropolis on the day 
when some great national idol was carried in funeral pomp to his 
grave, and, chancing to walk near the course through which it passed, 
has felt powerfully in the silence and desertion of the streets, and in 
the stagnation of ordinary business, the deep interest which at that 
moment was possessing the heart of man — if, all at once, he should 
hear the death-like stillness broken up by the sound of wheels rat- 
tling away from the scene, and making known that the transitory 
vision was dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment was his 
sense of the complete suspension and pause in ordinary human con- 
cerns so full and affecting as at that moment when the suspension 
ceases and the goings-on of human life are suddenly resumed. All 
action in any direction is best expounded, measured, and made 
apprehensible, by reaction. Now apply this to the case in Macbeth. 
Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human heart, and the en- 
trance of the fiendish heart, was to be expressed and made sensible. 
Another world has stept in; and the murderers are taken out of 
the region of human beings, human purposes, human desires. Mac- 
beth has forgot that he was born of woman; both are conformed to 
the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly revealed. 
But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable? In order that 
a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. 
The murderers and the murder must be insulated — cut off by an 
immeasurable gulf from the ordinary tide and succession of human 
affairs — locked up and sequestered in some deep recess; we must be 
made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested — 
laid aside — tranced — racked into a dread armistice. [Time must be 
annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and all must pass 
aelf-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly pas- 
sion.] Hence it is that when the deed is done, when the work of 
darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a 
pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and it 
makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced; the human 
has made its refiux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning 



44 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the 
world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the 
awful parenthesis that had suspended them. 

We perceive, then, with how right an artistry Shake- 
speare throws all the effect of this knocking upon the souls 
within. Suppose an inferior artist at work writing a 
play on this theme. Suppose that he sets the scene on the 
outside of the door. Suppose Macduff and Lennox to ar- 
rive in the dawn, after the night of tempest, and to stand 
there, Macduff with his hand on the knocker, the pair 
chatting lightly before they ask admission. That were a 
situation with no little of tragic irony in it, since we, the 
spectators, know upon what they are to knock. Suppose 
the door to open upon a sudden cry and the sight of Dun- 
can's body borne down by his sons into the daylight of 
the courtyard. That were a ' situation ' indeed ; yet 
how flat in comparison with Shakespeare's ! 

Let me give a special reason, too, why it would have 
been flat: for this also illustrates workmanship. It is 
that, excepting only Banquo (and I am to talk of 
Banquo), he has deliberately flattened down every other 
character to throw up Macbeth and Lady Macbeth into 
high relief. For why? Because he had, against odds, to 
interest us in them, and only in them. As I demanded 
before, who cares more than a farthing for Macduff or 
even less than a farthing for Lennox ? Says Dr. Brad- 
ley of the Macduffs, " I^either they, nor Duncan, nor 
Malcolm, nor even Banquo himself, have been imagined 
intensely, and therefore they do not produce that sense 
of unique personality which Shakespeare could con- 
vey in a much smaller number of lines than he gives 



MACBETH 45 

to most of them. And this is, of course, even more the 
case with persons like Koss, Angus and Lennox, though 
each of these has distinguishable features. I doubt if 
any other great play of Shakespeare's contains so many 
speeches which a student of the play, if they were quoted 
to him, would be puzzled to assign to the speakers. Let 
the reader turn, for instance, to the Second Scene of the 
Fifth Act, and ask himself why the names of the persons 
should not be interchanged in all the ways mathematically 
possible." To be sure they could: because Shakespeare 
was taking good care all the time that not one of these 
puppets should engage our interest, to compete in it for 
one moment with the two great figures of guilt in whom 
(as I have tried to show) he had so jealously to keep us 
absorbed. 

(2)' 

I wish to pursue a little further this effect of ' flatten- 
ing' (as I call it) the subsidiary characters. But first 
let me deal with the Porter, and so get our business of 
the knocking out of the way. 

There are critics who find the Porter's humour offen- 
sive and irrelevant: who complain (Heaven help them!) 
that it is a low humour and ordinary. As Charles Lamb 
said of the Surveyor, " O, let me feel the gentleman's 
bumps — I must feel his bumps." For answer to these 
critics (if answer be seriously required) I would refer 
them to a play entitled Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, 
written about the same time as Macbeth and, oddly 
enough, by the same author, and invite them to explain 
why this same Prince of Denmark, after an agonising col- 



46 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

loquy with his father's ghost, should break out into shout- 
ing back on it, " Art thou there, truepenny ? " " Well 
said, old mole ! " and swearing his comrades to secrecy^ 
upon the profound remark that 

There's ne'er a villain dwelling in all Denmark 
But — ^he's an arrant knave. 

This is the laughter in which surcharged hysteria breaks 
and expends itself. I have scarce patience to enlarge 
that explanation. Some who read these lines are too 
young, perhaps, to have yet suffered a great tension such 
as must sooner or later befall every man, though his life 
be ever so happy. He who has not known, that tension, 
stretched maybe over weeks, say by the almost desperate 
illness of a wife or a child, cannot know upon what sheer 
craziness the delivered soul recoils. Yet he may guess, 
as, alas! he will assuredly learn, and as Shakespeare 
knew. 

To be brief, the Porter's speech is just such a dis- 
charge, vicarious, of the spectator's overwrought emotion; 
and it is quite accurately cast into low, everyday lan- 
guage, because that which knocks at the gate is not any 
dark terrific doom — for all the darkness, all the terror, 
is cooped within^ — but the sane, clear, broad, ordinary, 
common work-a-day order of the world reasserting itself, 
and none the more relentingly for being work-a-day, and 
common, and ordinary, and broad, clear, sane. 

(3) 
Let us now return to Shakespeare's clever — as it seems 
to me, his immensely clever — ^flattening of the virtuous 



MACBETH 47 

characters in this play. I have suggested the word for 
them. — for your Rosses and Lennoxes. They are ordinary, 
and of purpose ordinary. 

If we consider this carefully, we shall see that one or 
two consequences flow from it. 

To begin with a very practical piece of workmanship — 
The Elizabethan stage, as I have remarked, had not a 
straight-drawn front, with footlights, but thrust forward 
from its broad platform a sort of horn upon the audi- 
torium. Along the narrowed platform a player who had 
some specially fine passage to declaim advanced and 
began, laying his hand to his heart — 

"All the world's a stage ..." 

or 

"The quality of mercy is not strained ..." 

or (raising his hand to his brow) 

"To be, or not to be: that is the question" — 

and, having delivered himself, pressed his hand to his 
heart again, bowed to the discriminating applause, and 
retired into the frame of the play. An Elizabethan audi- 
ence loved these conscious parades of rhetoric, and in 
most of his plays Shakespeare was careful to provide op- 
portunities for them. But we shall hardly find any in 
Macbeth. Here, by flattening the virtuous characters al- 
most to figures on tapestry, Shakespeare flattened back 
his whole stage. Obviously, neither Macbeth nor his 
lady, with their known antecedents, were the kind of per- 
sons to stalk forward and spout virtue: and the virtuous 



48 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

receive no chance, because virtue has all the while to be 
kept uninteresting. 

Further, this flattening of the virtuous characters gives 
Macbeth (already Greek in its simplicity of plot) just 
that conviction of Doom, avenging and inexorable, which 
is often attributed to the Greek tragedians as their last, 
and lost, secret. I reiterate that nobody can care more than 
a farthing for Macduff on his own account. He had, to be 
sure, an unusual start in the world ; but he has not quite 
lived up to it. His escape, which leaves his wife and chil- 
dren at Macbeth's merciless mercy, is (to say the least) 
unheroic. By effecting Macbeth's discomfiture through 
such a man of straw, Shakespeare impresses on us the con- 
viction — or, rather, he leaves us no room for anything but 
the conviction — that Heaven is at the work of avenging, 
and the process of retribution is made the more imposing 
as its agents are seen in themselves to be naught. 

(4) 

I come now to Banquo, who really has individual char- 
acter: and the more we study Banquo (limned for us in 
a very few strokes, by the way), the more, I think, we 
find cause to wonder at Shakespeare as a workman. The 
Chronicle makes Banquo guilty as an accomplice before 
the fact. Here are Holinshed's words: — 

At length therefore communicating his purposed intent with his 
trustie friendes, amongst whom Banquho was the chiefest, upon 
confidence of theyr promised ayde, he [Macbeth] slewe the King at 
Envemes, etc. 

IN'ow, in the play, on the eve of the murder Macbeth 
does seem to hang for a moment on the edge of impart- 



MACBETH 49 

ing his purpose to Banquo, who has just brought him the 
King's diamond. " I dreamt," says Banquo, 

I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters — 
To you they have showed much truth. 

Macbeth returns: 

I think not of them: 
Yet, when we can entreat an hour to serve, 
We would spend it in some words upon this business, 
If you would grant the time. 

'And Banquo replies: 

At your kind'st leisure. 

His leisure ! Macbeth's " kindest leisure " at that mo- 
ment! Let the reader remember it when I come to say 
a word on the all-pervading irony of this play. The 
dialogue goes on: — 

Macbeth. If you should cleave to my consent, when 'tis, 

It shall make honour for you. 
Banquo. So I lose none 

In seeking to augment it, but still keep 

My bosom franchis'd and allegiance clear, 

I shall be counsell'd. 
Macbeth. Good repose the while! 

Banquo. Thanks, sir: the like to you! 

!N"ow, why did Shakespeare avoid the Chronicle at 
this point and send Banquo to bed with a clear conscience ? 
The commentators are ready, as usual. " Why, don't 
you see ? Banquo was to be father to a line of kings 
the last of whom, in 1603, had inherited the throne of 
t England also, ' and two-fold balls and treble sceptres 
swayed.' It would never do, in a play written some time 



50 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

before 1610 for performance bj His Majesty's Servants, 
to depict His Majesty's Scottisb forbear as an accom- 
plice in treason." 

O Tweedledum! O Tweedledee! how near we came 
to forget something so profoundly true! Yet, though 
profoundly true, and even illuminating in its way, it 
scarcely illustrates the way in which dramatic master- 
pieces are constructed. At least, I think not. 

Let us try again, and we shall find two most potent 
artistic reasons — one simple, the other subtler, but both 
(as I say) potent — ^why Shakespeare did not involve 
Banquo in Macbeth's guilt. 

In the first place, it is surely obvious that by sharing 
the plot up with Banquo and other " trustie friendes " 
(in Holinshed's phrase) Shakespeare would have de- 
stroyed the impressiveness of Macbeth and his wife. 
In proportion as he dragged in that crowd, and just so 
far, would he have shortened the stature, blurred the 
outlines, marred the effect of that tremendous pair, who, 
as it is, command us by the very isolation of their 
grandeur in guilt. 

The second reason is subtler, though scarcely less 
strong. In all great literature there is always a sense 
of the norm. Even in Shakespeare's most terrific and 
seismic inventions — ^when, as in Hamlet or in Lear, he 
seems to be breaking up the solid earth under our feet 
— there is always some point and standard of sanity to 
which all enormities and passionate errors are referred 
by us, albeit unconsciously, for correction; on which the 
agitated mind of the spectator settles back as upon its 
centre of gravity. 



MACBETH 61 

It was Coventry Patmore wlio first tauglit me to see 
this clearly, in his little book Principle in Art. He calls 
it the pundum indifferens or Point of Kest. In a paint- 
ing (he shows) it may be — often is — something appar- 
ently insignificant: a sawn-off stump in a landscape of 
Constable's; in the Dresden Madonna of Eaphael, the 
heel of the Infant — which yet, as we know, was to 
bruise, yea, to crush, the Serpent's head. " Cover these 
from sight," says he, " and, to the moderately sensitive 
and cultivated eye, the whole life of the picture will be 
found to have been lowered." But, he continues, it is 

in the most elaborate plays of Shakespeare that we find this 
device in its fullest value; and it is from two or three of these that 
I shall draw my main illustration of a little-noticed but very im- 
portant principle of art. In King Lear it is by the character of 
Kent; in Romeo and Juliet by Friar Laurence; in Hamlet by Ho- 
ratio; in Othello by Cassio, and in The Merchant of Venice by 
Bassanio, that the point of rest is supplied. . . . Thus Horatio is 
the exact punctum indifferens between the opposite excesses of the 
characters of Hamlet and Laertes — over-reasoning inaction and 
unreasoning action — between which extremes the whole interest of 
the play vibrates. The unobtrusive character of Kent is, as it were, 
the eye of the tragic storm which rages round it; and the departure, 
in various directions, of every character more or less from modera- 
tion, rectitude or sanity, is the more clearly understood or felt from 
our more or less conscious reference to him. So with the central and 
comparatively unimpressive characters in many other plays — char- 
acters unimpressive on account of their facing the exciting and 
trying circumstances of the drama with the regard of pure reason, 
justice, and virtue. Each of these characters is a peaceful focus 
radiating the calm of moral solution throughout all the diflSculties 
1 and disasters of surrounding fate; a vital centre, which, like that 
of a great wheel, has little motion in itself, but which at once 
I transmits and controls the fierce revolution of the circumference. 

Now in Macbeth Banquo supplies this Point of Pest. 
' He is — though on an enlarged scale, having to stand be- 



62 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

side the ' hero ' — ^the Ordinary Man. Like Macbeth, he 
is a thane, a general, a gallant soldier. The two have 
fought side by side for the same liege-lord and, without 
jealousy, have helped one another to conquer. They are 
brought upon the stage together, two equal friends return- 
ing from victory. To Banquo as to Macbeth the Witches' 
predictions are offered. Macbeth shall be King of 
Scotland: Banquo shall beget kings. But whereas Mac- 
beth, taking evil for good and under persuasion of his 
wife as well as of the supernatural, grasps at the im- 
mediate means to the end, Banquo, like an ordinary, 
well-meaning, sensible fellow, doesn't do it, and there- 
fore on the fatal night can go like an honest man to his 
dreams. 

This is not to say that Banquo did not feel the tempta- 
tion. 

To be sure he did: and Shakespeare would not have 
been Shakespeare if he had not made Banquo feel it. 
The point is that, feeling it (I do not say strongly — it 
may have been lethargically, as ordinary decent men do 
feel the spur to emprises which mean the casting-off of 
honour), Banquo did not yield to it: and (as it seems to 
me) Dr. Bradley wastes a great deal of subtlety in trying 
to show him an accessory after the event, since he ap- 
parently acquiesces in Macbeth's attainment of the 
crown, while suspecting his guilt. For or against this 
I shall only quote Banquo's own words when the murder 
is discovered: 

Fears and scruples shake us: 
In the great hand of God I stand, and thence 
Against the undivulged pretence I fight 
Of treasonous malice 



MACBETH 63 

— and leave the reader to determine. For what does it 
matter? What does matter is that of the two soldiers 
one is tempted and yields, the other is tempted but does 
not yield. 

And it matters in this way: that from the moment 
Macbeth yields and apparently succeeds, Banquo, who 
has not yielded, becomes a living reproach to him. He 
is the shadowiest of dangers, but a very actual reproach: 
and therefore Macbeth's first instinct is, by removing 
Banquo, to obliterate the standard of decency, of loyalty — 
if that loyalty were partial only, why, then, the more 
credit for obeying it ! — ^which survives to accuse him. So 
Banquo becomes naturally the first sacrifice to be paid 
to a guilty conscience, and Banquo is murdered. / 

But now let us mark this : We are scarcely yet midway 
in Act iii: a half of the play has to come and we have 
done away with the one man who, on the principle we 
have been examining, is the touchstone to test the wrong 
from the reasonably right. All the other characters are 
mere shadows of men, painted on the flat. Macduff sur- 
vives to be the avenger, but he is to be the avenger by 
no strength of his own, and he survives (as I have said) 
by a pretty base action, fleeing the country and leaving 
his wife and children behind, unprotected. 

The answer is that Banquo survives in his ghost: and 
that the accusing sanity is still carried forward in the next 
victim, little Macduff — one of those gallant, precocious, 
straight-talking children in whom Shakespeare delighted 
— it may be because he had lost such a son, at just such 
tan age. Be it noted how this boy is introduced close 
after Macbeth's purposed visit to the Witches — he 



54 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

seeking them, this time. (Another touch of insight: it 
is always the Devil who first accosts, and the victim who 
later pays the visits, seeking ways of escape.) 

Straight upon that foul scene in the cavern light 
breaks, for the last time in the drama, in the sunny wis- 
dom of a child. Good gospel, too, as I take it — 

" Was my father a traitor, mother ? " 
" Ay, that he was." 
" What is a traitor ? " 

— And so on. " Now God help thee, poor monkey ! '^ 
says his mother at length (irony again), even while the 
Murderer is at the gate, being admitted. 

" Where is your husband ? . . . He's a traitor," 
are the words in the Murderer's mouth. 

" Thou liest, thou shag-hair'd villain," answers up the 
proud, plucky boy, a moment before he is stabbed. 

All these pretty ones end tragically in Shakespeare: 
but surely this one in this play lives his few moments 
not wholly in vain. 

(5) 

The wonderful counterpoise of will and character be- 
tween Macbeth and his wife has been so often and on 
the whole so well discussed that I shall take leave to 
say very little about it, on the understanding that there, 
at any rate, the marvels of the workmanship are accepted. 
But two brief notes I will make. — 

(1) Looking into the matter historically, I cannot 
find that the critics even began to do Lady Macbeth justice 
until Mrs. Siddons taught them. Johnson, for example. 



MACBETH 65 

■wrote that " Lady Macbeth is merely detested." An 
amazing judgment that seems to one who saw Ellen Terry 
rehearsing the part, and sat and watched John Sargent 
painting her, in her green robe of beetles' wings, as she 
stood in the act of lifting the crown to her brow ! 

Exquisitely chosen moment! Eor, reading the play 
carefully, let us observe how, for her, everything ends 
in that achievement. Up to it, hers has been the tiger 
nature, with every faculty glued, tense on the purpose, 

j on the prey : her husband but a half-hearted accomplice. 
The end achieved, it would seem that the spring of action 
somehow breaks within her. It is Macbeth who, like a 

. man, shoulders the weight of moral vengeance. She al- 
most fades out. She is always the great lady; and while 
she can, she helps. They are both great : never one vul- 
gar word of reproach or recrimination passes between 

. them. But they drift apart. Macbeth no longer relies 

j on her. TJncounselled by her, he seeks the Witches again ; 

I solitary he pursues his way ; and her mental anguish is left 

: to be watched by a Doctor and a Gentlewoman. It is 
but reported to her husband. When the wail of the wait- 

1 ing-woman announces her death, he is busy arming him- 
self for his doom. AH he finds to say on the word 

'"dead "is: 

She should have died hereafter: 
There would have been a time for such a word.' 

(6) 
Through its strong simplicity of plot, its flattening of 
the stage and of all the subsidiary characters, its working 
out of vengeance by agents who are carefully; kept as mere 



66 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

puppets in the hand of Heaven, Macbeth bears a re- 
semblance unique among Shakespeare's writings to Greek 
Tragedy; nor can it by accident be full of that irony in 
which the Greek tragedians — say Sophocles — delighted. 

But it is to be observed that the irony most prevalent 
in Macbeth is, if not an invention of Shakespeare's own, 
at least not the usual tragic irony, that consists in mak- 
ing the protagonist utter words which, coming on the 
momentary occasion to his lips, convey to the audience 
(who know what he does not) a secondary, sinister, 
prophetic meaning. 

There is, to be sure, some of this traditional tragic 
irony in Macbeth: but its peculiar irony is retrospective 
rather than prophetic. It does not prepare the spectator 
for what is to come; but rather, when it comes, reminds 
him— as by an echo— that it has been coming all the while. 
Thus, when Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stare — ^how dif- 
ferently ! — at their bloodied fingers, he says, 

• Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood 
Clean from my hand ? 

She says confidently, 

A little water clears us of this deed. 

The irony is not yet. It comes in after-echo, in the sleep- 
walking scene, when (he having passed beyond account 
of it) she says, " Here's the smell of blood still ! All the 
perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." 

So when the ghost of Banquo seats itself at the feast, 
we catch, as by echo, the insistent invitation. 

Fall not oiu: feast. 



MACBETH 57 

with^ the promise, 

My lord, I will not: 
as, when Macbeth calls out on the same ghost. 

What man dares, I dare: 
Take any shape but that! 

we hear again, 

1 dare do all that may become a man: 
Who dares do more is none. 

Again, when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane, do we 
not catch again the whisper. 

Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak? 

The whole of Macbeth, as it were a corridor of dark 
Inverness Castle, resounds with such echoes: and I know 
no drama that matches it in these whispers (as I will call 
them) of reminiscent irony. 

Macbeth (as I have said and as others have said before 
me) curiously resembles Greek tragedy in a dozen ways, 
of which I will mention but one more. 

Though it is full of blood and images of blood, the im- 
portant blood-shedding is hidden, removed from the spec- 
tator's sight. There is, to be sure, a set scene for Banquo's 
murder: but it can be omitted without detriment to the 
play, and, in fact, always is omitted. Duncan is mur- 
dered off the stage; Lady Macbeth dies off the stage; 
Macbeth makes his final exit fighting, to be killed off the 
stage. There is nothing here like the " blood-bolter'd " 
culmination of Hamlet, 



68 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Lastly — for there is no space left to argue it — I will 
confess my conviction that this tragedy so curiously re- 
sembling classical tragedy does, in fact, overpass in its 
bold workmanship any classical tragedy. 

As we remember, Milton once proposed to rewrite 
Macbeth. The entry in his list of projects runs: 
" Macbeth, beginning at the arrival of Malcolm at Mac- 
duff. The matter of Duncan may be expressed by the 
appearing of his ghost." 

Milton, in effect, wished to cast Macbeth in the strict 
form of classical tragedy, as he afterwards cast Samson 
Agonistes. And another Cambridge man, Professor 
Richard Moulton, has actually taken Shakespeare's 
Macbeth and, by one of the most brilliant tours de force 
in modern criticism, recast it, with a Chorus and all, 
step by step back into a Greek tragedy. 

Yes, and he uses scarcely anything that cannot be 
found in Shakespeare. It is an uncannily clever per- 
formance. But his permanent scene is, of course, 
Dunsinane Castle, not Inverness. That is to say, the 
play begins when all but the slow retribution — all that 
we first think of in Macbeth — is concluded. 

T have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise? 

Infirm of purpose. 
Give me the daggers. 

{Knock, knock, knock.) 

And he begins with a Prologue spoken by Hecate. 
Hecate! — I have said nothing of her because (to be 
quite frank) I do not yet understand her. The com- 



MACBETH 59 

mentators, ready as usual, surmise that Middleton, or 
somebody like Middleton, interpolated Hecate. I hesi- 
tate to accept this. It does not appear likely to me that 
a whole set of foolish men (though Middleton in itself 
seems a well-enough-invented name) were kept perma- 
nently employed to come in and write something whenever 
Shakespeare wanted it foolish. 
But . . . Hecate! 

It is permissible, I hope, to the meanest of us to think 
to himself, at one time or another, " ISTow which in the 
"world among masterpieces should I be proudest (God giv- 
ing me grace) to have written? " My own choice would 
not be Macbethj or, indeed, any tragedy: nor either the 
Divina Commedid or Paradise Lost, since, divine as are 
the accents of Dante and Milton, their religious systems, 
so diverse, yet both based on hatred rather than on char- 
ity, do not attract me. I think I would liefest have 
written The Tempest — or Don Quixote: I can never de- 
cide between those two. Yes, in The Tempest the amazing 
craft which had imagined and designed Macbeth has 
beaten out of darkness to anchor in a fair haven of 
peace and sanity. But as an operation of genius and 
skill, beating through the dark and never losing one inch 
of a tack, I know nothing to equal this marvellous drama. 



CHAPTER IV 
A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM 

Shakespeare's and Dickens's use of pet devices — Women in male 
disguise — Shipwrecks — Influence of Lyly and Plautus — Advance from 
stagecraft to characterisation — The stigmata of a court play — The 
value of inquiring Horn was the thing done? — The import of the 
fairies and the clowns — An ideal setting for the play. 

(1) 

De. Jowett^ famous Master of Balliol — 
But in the manner of Sterne I must break off, here 
at the outset, to recall that figure, so familiar to me in 
youth, as every morning he crossed the quad beneath my 
bedroom window in a contiguous college for an early trot 
around its garden ; a noticeable figure, too — small, rotund, 
fresh of face as a cherub, yet with its darting gait and 
in its swallow-tailed coat curiously suggestive of a belated 
Puck surprised by dawn and hurrying to 

hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear. 

— Dr. Jowett used to maintain that after Shakespeare the 
next creative genius in our literature was Charles Dickens. 
As everybody knows, Dickens left an unfinished novel 
behind him; and a number of ingenious writers from 
time to time have essayed to finish the story of Edwin 
Drood, constructing the whole from the fragment — ^yet 
not from the fragment only, since in the process they 
are forced into examining the plots of other novels of 

60 



A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM 61 

his; so into recognising that his invention had certain 
trends — certain favourite stage-tricks, artifices, cliches — 
which it took almost predicably; and so to argue, from 
how he constructed by habit, how he probably would have 
constructed this particular tale. 

I do not propose, in a paper on A Midsummer' 
Night's Dream, to attempt an ending for Edwin Drood, 
but I suggest that if inventive criticism, driven up against 
such an obstacle as Drood, turns perforce to examine 
Dickens's habitual trends of invention, his favourite 
artifices and cliches, the same process may be as service- 
able in studying the workmanship of the greater artist, 
Shakespeare. 

For example, no careful reader of Dickens can fail 
to note his predilection for what I will call denouement 
by masJced battery. At the critical point in story after 
story, and at a moment when he believes himself secure, 
the villain is ' rounded on ' by a supposed confederate 
or a supposed dupe, a concealed battery is opened, catches 
him unawares, levels him with his machinations to the 
ground. Thus Monks brings about the crisis of Oliver 
Twist; thus Ralph ISTickleby and Uriah Heep are brought 
to exposure; thus severally Jonas and Mr. Pecksniff in 
Martin Chuzzlewit; thus Quilp and Brass in The Old 
Curiosity Shop. Thus Haredale forces the conclusion 
of Bamaby Budge; thus in BleaJc House Lady Dedlock 
(though she, to be sure, cannot be reckoned among the 
villains) is hunted down. Hunted Down, in fact, the 
name of one of Dickens's stories, might serve for any 
other of a dozen. Sometimes the denouncer — old Chuz- 
zlewit, Mr. Micawber, Mr. Boffin — reaches his moment 



62 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

after a quite incredibly long practice of dissimulation. 
But always the pursuit is patient, hidden; always the 
coup sudden, dramatic, enacted before witnesses; always 
the trick is essentially the same — and the guilty one, 
after exposure, usually goes off and in one way or an- 
other commits suicide. 

I instance one only among Dickens's pet devices. But 
he had a number of them : and so had Shakespeare. 

Take the trick of the woman disguised in man's ap- 
parel. It starts with Julia in The Two Gentlemen of 
iVerona. It runs (and good reason why it should, when 
we consider that all women's parts were acted by 
boys) right through the comedies and into Cymheline. 
Portia, Nerissa, Jessica (these three in one play) ; Rosa- 
lind, Viola, Imogen — each in turn masquerades thus, 
and in circumstances that, unless we take stage conven- 
tion on its own terms, beggar credulity. 

The bridegroom may forget the bride 
Was made his wedded wife yestreen, 

but not in the sense that Bassanio and Gratiano forget. 
Is it credible that Bassanio shall catch no accent, no 
vibration, to touch, awaken, thrill his memory during 
all that long scene in the Doge's court, or afterwards when 
challenged to part vtdth his ring ? Translated into actual 
life, is it even conceivable? 

Let us take another device — that of working the plot 
upon a shipwreck, shown or reported. (There is per- 
haps no better way of starting romantic adventures, mis- 
adventures, meetings, recognitions; as there is no better 
way to strip men more dramatically of all trappings that 



A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM 63 

cover their native nobility or baseness.) The Comedy 
of Errors and Pericles are pivoted on shipwreck; 
by shipvs^reck Perdita in The ^Y^nters Tale is aban- 
doned on the magical seacoast of Bohemia. Twelfth 
Night takes its intrigue from shipwreck, and, for act- 
ing purposes, opens with Viola's casting-ashore. — 

Viola. What country, friends, is this? 

Captain. Illyria, lady. 

Viola. And what should I do in Illyria? 

My brother he is in Elysium. 

Perchance he is not drown'd — ^what think you, sailors? 
Captain. It is perchance that you yourself were sav'd. 

The Tempest opens in the midst of shipwreck. 
In The Comedy of Errors and in Twelfth Night 
shipwreck leads on to another trick — that of mistaken 
identity, as it is called. In The Comedy of Errors 
(again) and Pericles it leads on to the trick of a 
long-lost mother, supposed to have perished in shipwreck, 
revealed as living yet and loving. From shipwreck the 
fairy Prince lands to learn toil and through it to find 
his love, the delicate Princess to wear homespun and 
find her lover. 

One might make a long list of these favourite themes ; 
from Shakespeare's pet one of the jealous husband or 
lover and the woman foully misjudged (Hero, Desde- 
mona, Hermione), to the trick of the potion which arrests 
life without slaying it (Juliet, Imogen), or the trick 
of the commanded murderer whose heart softens (Hubert, 
Leonine, Pisanio). But perhaps enough has been said 
to suggest an enquiry by which any reader may assure 
himself that Shakespeare, having once employed a stage 



64 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

device with some degree of success, had never the small- 
est scruple about using it again. Rather, I suppose that 
there was never a great author who repeated himself 
at once so lavishly and so economically, still husbanding 
his favourite themes while ever attempting new variations 
upon them. In the very wealth of this variation we find 
" God's plenty," of course. But so far as I dare to un- 
derstand Shakespeare, I see him as a magnificently in- 
dolent man, not agonising to invent new plots, taking 
old ones as clay to his hands, breathing life into that clay ; 
anon unmaking, remoulding, reinspiring it. We know 
for a fact that he worked upon old plays, old chronicles, 
other men's romances. We know, too, that men of his 
time made small account of what we call plagiarism, and 
even now define it as a misdemeanour quite loosely and 
almost capriciously.'- Shakespeare, who borrowed other 
men's inventions so royally, delighted in repeating and 
improving his own. 

(2) 
It has been pretty well established by scholars 
that the earlier comedies of Shakespeare run in the fol- 
lowing chronological order: Loves Labour's Lost, The 
Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, A 
Midsummer-Night's Dream. It may, indeed, be argued 
that The Comedy of Errors came before Love's Labour's 

* For instance, any poet or dramatist may take the story of 
Tristram and Iseult and make what he can of it; whereas if I use 
a plot of Mr. Hall Caine's or of Mrs. Humphry Ward's, I am a 
'branded thief. The reader will find an amusing attempt to delimit 
the offence of plagiarism in an appendix to Charles Keade's novel 
The Wandering Heir. 



A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM 65 

Lost, but whether it did or did not matters very little to 
us ; so let us take the four in the order generally assigned 
by conjecture. 

In the 1598 Quarto of Love's Labour's Lost we are 
informed that it was presented before her Highness this 
last Christmas and is now " newly corrected and aug- 
mented by W. Shakespeare." It was a court play, then, 
and indeed it bears every mark of one. It is an imitative 
performance, after the fashionable model of John Lyly; 
but it imitates with a high sense of humour and burlesques 
its model audaciously. 

All young artists in drama are preoccupied with plot 
or ' construction.' ' Character ' comes later. The plot of 
Love's Labour's Lost turns on ' confusion of iden- 
tity,' the Princess and her ladies masking themselves to 
the perplexity of their masked lovers. For the rest, in 
its whole conception as in its diction, the thing is con- 
sciously artificial and extravagant from first to last. 

The Comedy of Errors is an experiment on a dif- 
ferent model; not Lyly now, but Plautus, and Plautus 
out-Plautus'd. Again we have confusion of identity 
for the motive, but here confusion of identity does not 
merely turn the plot, as in Love's Labour's Lost; it 
means all the play, and the play means nothing else. 
Where Plautus had one pair of twin brothers so featured 
that they cannot be told apart, Shakespeare adds another 
pair, and the fun is dravsm out with astonishing dex- 
terity. Let three things, however, be observed: (1) The 
feat is achieved at a total sacrifice of character — and in- 
deed he who starts out to confuse identity must, con- 
sciously; or not, set himself the task of obliterating char- 



66 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

acter. (2) Unless a convention of pasteboard be ac- 
cepted as substitute for flesh and blood, the events are in- 
credible. (3) On the stage of Plautus the convention 
of two men being like enough in feature to deceive even 
their wives might pass. It was actually a convention of 
pasteboard, since the players wore masks. Paint two 
masks alike, and (since masks muffle voices) the trick is 
done. But (4) Shakespeare, dispensing with the masks, 
doubled the confusion by tacking a pair of Dromios 
on to a pair of Antipholuses ; and to double one situation 
so improbable is to multiply its improbability by the 
hundred. 

It is all done, to be sure, with such amazing resource 
that, were ingenuity of stagecraft the test of great drama, 
we might say, " Here is a man who has little or nothing to 
learn." But ingenuity of stagecraft is not the test of 
great drama; and in fact Shakespeare had more than a 
vast deal to learn. He had a vast deal to unlearn. 

A dramatic author must start by mastering certain 
stage-mechanics. Having mastered them, he must — ^to 
be great — unlearn reliance on them, learn to cut them 
away as he grows to perceive that the secret of his art 
resides in playing human being against human being, 
man against woman, character against character, will 
against will — not in devising ' situations ' or ' curtains ' 
and operating his puppets to produce these. His art 
touches climax when his ' situations ' and ' curtains ' 
so befall that we tell ourselves, " It is wonderful — ^yet 
what else could have happened ? " Othello is one of 
the cleverest stage plays ever written. What does it leave 
us to say but, in an awe of pity, " This is most terrible. 



A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM 67 

but it must have happened so " ? In great art, as in life, 
character makes the bed it lies on, or dies on. 

So in the next play, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 
we find Shakespeare learning and, perhaps even more de- 
liberately, unlearning. The Two Gentlemen of Verona 
is not a great play: but it is a curious one, and a 
very wardrobe of ^ effects ' in which Shakespeare after- 
wards dressed himself to better advantage. 

In The Two Gentlemen of Verona Shakespeare is 
feeling for character, for real men and women. Tricks 
no longer satisfy him. Yet the old tricks haunt him. He 
must have again, as in The Comedy of Errors, two 
gentlemen with a servant apiece — though the opposition is 
discriminated and more cunningly balanced. Eor stage 
effect Proteus (supposed a friend and a gentleman) must 
suddenly behave with incredible baseness. For stage 
effect Valentine must surrender his true love to his false 
friend with a mawkish generosity that deserves nothing 
so much as kicking: 

All that was mine in Silvia I give thee. 

And what about Silvia? Where does Silvia come in? 
That devastating sentence may help the curtain, but it 
blows all character to the winds. There are now no Gen- 
tlemen in Verona! 

'(3)' 

We come to A Midsummer-Night's Dream; and, 
with the three earlier comedies to guide us, shall attempt 
to conjecture how the young playwright would face this 
new piece of work. 



68 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

First we shall ask, " What had he to do?" 
!N^obody knows precisely when, or precisely where, or 
precisely how, A Midsummer-Night's Dream was first 
produced. But it is evident to me that, like Lovers 
Labour's Lost and The Tempest, it was written for 
performance at court; and that its particular occa- 
sion, like the occasion of The Tempest, was a court 
wedding. It has all the stigmata of a court play. 
Like Love's Labour's Lost and The Tempest, it con- 
tains an interlude; and that interlude — Bully Bottom's 
Pyramv^ and Thisbe — is designed, rehearsed, enacted 
for a wedding. Can any one read the opening scene or 
the closing speech of Theseus and doubt that the occasion 
was a wedding? Be it remembered, moreover, how the 
fairies dominate this play; and how constantly and inti- 
mately fairies are associated with weddings in Elizabethan 
poetry, their genial favours invoked, their malign caprices 
prayed against. I take a stanza from Spenser's great 
Epithalamion : 

Let no deluding dreames, nor dreadfull sights 

Make sudden sad affrights; 

Ne let house-fyres, nor lightnings helpelesse harmes, 

Ne let the Pouke nor other evill sprights, 

Ne let mischivous witches with theyr charmes, 

Ne let hob-Groblins, names whose sense we see not, 

Fray us with things that be not: 

Let not the shriech Oule nor the Storke be heard, 

Nor the night Raven that still deadly yels; 

Nor damnSd ghosts cald up with mighty spels, 

Nor griesly Vultures, make us once afeard, 

Ne let th' unpleasant Quyre of Frogs still croking 

Make us to wish the'r choking. 

Let none of these theyr drery accents sing; 

Ne let the woods them answer, nor theyr eccho ring. 



A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM 69 

And I compare this with the fairies' last pattering ditty 

in our play: 

Now the wasted brands do glow, 

Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud, 
Puts the wretch that lies in wo© 

In remembrance of a shroud. 
Now it is the time of night 

That the graves, all gaping wide. 
Every one lets forth his sprite. 

In the church-way paths to glide: 
And we fairies, that do run 

By the triple Hecate's team. 
From the presence of the sun. 

Following darkness like a dream. 
Now are frolic; not a mouse 
Shall disturb this hallow'd house; 
I am sent with broom, before, 
To sweep the dust behind the door. 

To the best bride-bed will we, 
Which by us shall blessfed be. . . . 

And each several chamber bless. 
Through this palace, with sweet peace. 

Can any one set these two passages together and 
douht A Midsummer-NigTit's Dream to be intended 
for a merry xaOapffi?, a pretty purgation, of those same 
'^goblin terrors which Spenser would exorcise from the 
bridal chamber? Tor my part, I make little doubt that 
Shakespeare had Spenser's very words in mind as he 
wrote. 

Here, then, we have a young playwright commissioned 
to write a wedding play — a play to be presented at court. 
He is naturally anxious to shine; and, moreover, though 
his fellow-playwrights already pay him the compliment 
of being a little jealous, he still has his spurs to win. 

As I read the play and seek to divine its process of 



70 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

construction, I seem — and the reader must take this for 
what it is worth — to see Shakespeare's mind working 
somewhat as follows: 

He turns over his repertory of notions, and takes stock. 

" Ljly's model has had its day, and the bloom is off it ; 
I must not repeat the experiment of Love's Labour's 
Lost. ... I have shown that I can do great things 
with mistaken identity, hut I cannot possibly express the 
fun of that further than I did in The Comedy of 
Errors; and the fun there was clever, but a trifle hard, 
if not inhuman. . . . But here is a wedding ; a wed- 
ding should be human; a wedding calls for poetry — and 
I long to fill a play with poetry. (For I can write poetry. 
Look at Venus and Adonis!) . . . Still, mistaken 
identity is a trick I know, a trick in which I am known 
to shine. ... If I could only make it poetical. ... A 
pair of lovers? For mistaken identity that means two 
pairs of lovers. . . . Yet, steady! We must not make 
it farcical. It was all very well to make wives mistake 
their husbands. That has been funny ever since the 
world began; that is as ancient as cuckoldry, or almost. 
Rut this is a wedding play, and the sentiment must be 
fresh. Lovers are not so easily mistaken as wives and 
husbands — or ought not to be — in poetry. 

" I like, too " — ^we fancy the young dramatist con- 
tinuing — " that situation of the scorned lady following 
her sweetheart. ... I did not quite bring it off in 
The Two Gentlemen of Verona; but it is none the less 
a good situation, and I must use it again.^ . . . Lovers 

'And he did: not only here, but in All's Well That Ends Well, 
for instance. 



A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM 71 

mistaking one another . . . scorned lady following the 
scomer . . . wandering through a wood (that is poeti- 
cal, anyhow) . . . Yes, and by night; this play has 
to be written for a bridal eve. ... A night for lovers 
— a summer's night — a midsummer's night — dewy thick- 
ets — the moon. . . . The moon? Why, of course, the 
moon! Pitch-darkness is for tragedy, moonlight for 
softer illusion. Lovers can be pardonably mistaken — 
under the moon. . . , What besides happens on a sum- 
mer's night, in a woodland, under the moon? 

"Eh? . . . Oh, by Heaven! Fairies! Real War- 
wickshire fairies! Fairies full of mischief — Robin 
Goodf allow and the rest. Don't I know about them? 
Fairies full of mischief — and for a wedding, too! How 
does that verse of Spenser's go ? 

Ne let the Pouke — 

" Fairies, artificers, and ministers of all illusion 
. . . the fairy ointment, philters, pranks, ' the little 
western flower ' — ■ 

Before milk-white, now purple with Love's wounds. 
And maidens call it Love-in-idleness. 

These and wandering lovers, a mistress scorned — ^why, 
we scarcely need the moon, after all ! " 

Then — for the man's fancy never started to work but 
it straightway teemed — we can watch it opening out new 
alleys of fun, weaving fresh delicacies upon this central 
invention. " How, for a tangle, to get one of the fairies 
caught in the web they spin ? Why not even the Fairy 
Queen herself ? . . . Yes ; but the mortal she falls in love 



72 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

with ? Shall he be one of the lovers ? . . . Well, to say 
truth, I haven't yet given any particular character to these 
lovers. The absolute jest would be to bring opposite 
extremes into the illusion, to make Queen Mab dote on a 
gross clown. . . . All very well, but I haven't any 
clowns. , . . The answer to that seems simple — If I 
haven't, I ought to have. . . . Stay! I have been for- 
getting the interlude all this while. We must have an 
interlude; our interlude in Love's Labour's Lost proved 
the making of the play. . . . ISTow suppose we make 
a set of clowns perform the interlude, as in Love's 
Labour's Lost, and get them chased by the fairies while 
they are rehearsing? Gross flesh and gossamer — that's 
an idea! If I cannot use it now, I certainly wiU some 
day.^ . . . But I can use it now! What is that story 
in Ovid, about Midas and the ass's ears? Or am I con- 
fusing it with another story — ^which I read the other 
day, in that book about witches — of a man transformed 
into an ass ? " 

Enough! I am not, of course, suggesting that Shake- | 
speare constructed A Midsummer-Night's Dream, just 
in this way. (As the provincial mayor said to the emi- 
nent statesman, " Aha, sir ! that's more than you or me i 
knows. That's Latin! '^) But I do suggest that we can 
immensely increase our delight in Shakespeare and ' 
strengthen our understanding of him if, as we read him 
again and again, we keep asking ourselves how the thing I 
was done. I am sure that — hopeless as complete suo 

* He did. See the last Act of The Merry Wives of Windsor. 



A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM 73 

cess must be — by this method we get far nearer to 
the to ri tjv eivai of a given play than by searching 
among ' sources ' and ' origins/ by debating how much 
Shakespeare took from Chaucer's Knight's Tale, or 
how much he borrowed from Golding's Ovid, or how 
much Latin he learned at Stratford Grammar School, or 
how far he anticipated modem scientific discoveries, or 
why he gave the names " Pease-blossom," " Cobweb," 
"Moth," "Mustard-Seed" to his fairies. I admit the 
idle fascination of some of these studies. A friend of 
mine — an old squire of Devon — used to demonstrate to 
me at great length that when Shakespeare wrote, in this 
play, of the moon looking " with a watery eye " — 

And when she weeps, weeps every little flower. 
Lamenting some enforced chastity — 

he anticipated our modern knowledge of plant-fertilisa- 
tion. Good man, he took " enforced " to mean " com- 
pulsory " ; and I never had the heart to dash his enthu- 
siasm by hinting that, as Shakespeare would use the \Yord 
" enforced," an " enforced chastity " meant a chastity 
violated. 

(4) 

Let us note three or four things that promptly follow 
upon Shakespeare's discovering the fairies and pressing 
them into the service of this play. 

(1) To begin with. Poetry follows. The springs of 
it in the author's Venus and Adonis are released, and 
for the first time he is able to pour it into drama: 



74 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

And never, since the middle summer's spring. 

Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead, 

By paved fountain, or by rushy brook. 

Or in the beached margent of the sea 

To dance our ringlets to the vphistling wind. . . . 

I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows, 
Where oxslips, and the nodding violet grows 
Quite over-canopied with lush woodbine. 
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine: 
There sleeps Titania some time of the night, 
LuU'd in these flowers. . . . 

The honey-bags steal from the humble bees, 
And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs. 
And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes. 
To have my love to bed, and to arise: 
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies 
To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes. 

Never so weary, never so in woe, 

Bedabbled with the dew and torn with briars — * 

The overstrained wit of Love's Labour's Lost, the 
hard gymnastic wit of The Comedy of Errors, al- 
lowed no chance for this sort of writing. But the plot of 
A Midsummer-Night's Dream, invites poetry; and poetry 
suffuses the play, as with potable moonlight. 

(2) The logic-chopping wit of Love's Labour's 
Lost had almost excluded humour. Hard, dry wit had 
cased The Comedy of Errors against it. With Lance 
in The Two Gentlemen of Verona we have an inciden- 
tal, tentative experiment in humour ; but Lance is no part 
of the plot. !N'ow, with Bottom and his men, we have 

* Echoed from Yenus and Adonis : 

The bushes in the way, 
Some catch her by the neck, some kiss her face. 
Some twine about her thigh to make her stay . . . 



A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM 75 

humour let loose in a flood. In the last Act it ripples and 
dances over the other flood of poetry, until demurely 
hushed by the elves. Now the two greatest gifts of 
Shakespeare were poetry and humour ; and in this play he 
first, and simultaneously, found scope for them. 

(3) As I see it, this invention of the fairies — this 
trust in an imaginative world which he understands — 
suddenly, in this play, eases and dissolves four-fifths of 
the difficulties Shakespeare has been finding with his 
plots. I remember reading, some years ago, a critique 
by Mr. Max Beerbohm on a performance of this play, 
and I wish I could remember his exact words, for his 
words are always worth exact quotation. But he said 
in effect, " Here we have the Master, confident in his 
art, at ease with it as a man in his dressing-gown, kick- 
ing up a loose slipper and catching it on his toe." 
A Midsummer-Night's Dream is the first play of Shake- 
speare's to show a really careless grace — the best grace 
of the Graces. By taking fairyland for granted, he comes 
into his inheritance; by assuming that we take it for 
granted, he achieves just that easy probability he missed 
in several plays before he came to trust his imagination 
and ours. 

(4) Lastly, let the reader note how the fairy busi- 
ness and the business of the clowns take charge of the 
■play as it proceeds, in proportion as both of them are 
more real — that is, more really imagined — than the busi- 
ness of Lysander and Hermia, Demetrius and Helena. 
The play has three plots interwoven: (a) the main sen- 
timental plot of the four Athenian lovers; (b) the fairy- 
plot which complicates (a) ; and (c), the grotesque plot 



76 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

which complicates (b). 'Now when we think of the play 
the main plot (a) comes last in our minds, for in (b) 
and (c) Shakespeare has found himself. 

(5) 

I once discussed with a friend how, if given our will, 
we would have A Midsummer-Night's Dream presented. 
We agreed at length on this : 

The set scene should represent a large Elizabethan 
hall, panelled, having a lofty oak-timbered roof and an 
enormous staircase. The cavity under the staircase, oc- 
cupying in breadth two-thirds of the stage, should be 
fronted with folding or sliding doors, which, being 
opened, should reveal the wood, recessed, moonlit, with 
its trees upon a flat arras or tapestry. On this secondary 
remoter stage the lovers should wander through their ad- 
ventures, the fairies now conspiring in the quiet hall 
under the lantern, anon withdrawing into the woodland 
to befool the mortals straying there. Then, for the last 
scene and the interlude of Pyramus and Thishe, the 
hall should be filled with lights and company. That 
over, the bridal couples go up the great staircase. Last 
of all — and after a long pause, when the house is quiet, 
the lantern all but extinguished, the hall looking vast 
and eerie, lit only by a last flicker from the hearth — ^the 
fairies, announced by Puck, should come tripping back, 
swarming forth from cupboards and down curtains, som- 
ersaulting down-stairs, sliding down the baluster rails; 
all hushed as they fall to work with their brooms — 
hushed, save for one little voice and a thin, small chorus 
scarcely more audible than the last dropping embers: 



A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM 77 

Through this house give glimmering light, 

By the dead and drowsy fire; 
Every elf and fairy sprite 

Hop as light as bird from brier. . . . 
Hand in hand, with fairy grace, 
.Will we sing and bless this place. 

Trip away. 
Make no stay. 
Meet me all by break of day. 



CHAPTER V 
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 

Its juvenile appeal — The diflfei-ence between setting and atmosphere 
— Unsympathetic characters — Bassanio and Antonio — Bad workman- 
ship — A vital flaw — Two sides of the Renaissance — Three plots of 
intrigue — Plot versus character — Tlie humanising of Shylock — Exag- 
gerated estimate of the Trial Scene — An amateur stage -manager's 
tribute to the workmanship of the play — Johnson on the "holy her- 
mit "—The fifth Act. 

(1) 

Since in the end it taught me a good deal, and since 
the reader too may find it serviceable, let me start by 
shortly rehearsing my own experience with The Merchant 
of Venice. 

I came first to it as a schoolboy, and though I got it 
by heart I could not love the play. I came to it (as I 
remember) straight from the woodland enchantments of 
As You Like It, and somehow this was not at all as I 
liked it. ISTo fairly imaginative youngster could miss see- 
ing that it was picturesque or, on the face of it, romantic 
enough for any one: as on the face of it no adventure 
should have been more delightful than to come out of the 
green Forest of Arden into sudden view of Venice, 
spread in the wide sunshine, with all Vanity Fair, all 
the Carnival de Yenise, in full swing on her quays; 
severe merchants trafficking, porters sweating with bales, 
pitcher-bearers, flower-girls, gallants; vessels lading, dis- 
charging, repairing; and up the narrower waterways 

78 



THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 79 

black gondolas shooting under high guarded windows, 
any gondola you please hooding a secret — of love, or as- 
sassination, or both — as any shutter in the line may open 
demurely, discreetly, giving just room enough, just time 
enough, for a hand to drop a rose ; Venice again at night 
— lanterns on the water, masqued revellers taking charge 
of the quays with drums, hautboys, fifes, and general 
tipsiness; withdrawn from this riot into deep intricacies 
of shadow, the undertone of lutes complaining their love ; 
and out beyond all this fever, far to southward, the stars 
swinging, keeping their circle — as Queen Elizabeth once 
danced — " high and disposedly " over Belmont, where on 
a turfed bank — 

Peace ho! the moon sleeps with Endymion, 
And would not be awak'd, 

though the birds have already started to twitter in Por- 
tia's garden. Have we not here the very atmosphere 
of romance? 

Well, no. . . . We have a perfect setting for ro- 
mance; but setting and atmosphere are two very differ- 
ent things. I fear we all suffer temptation in later life 
to sophisticate the thoughts we had as children, often to 
make thoughts of them when they were scarcely thoughts 
at all. But fetching back as honestly as I can to the 
child's mind, I seem to see that he found the whole 
thing heartless, or (to be more accurate) that he failed 
to find any heart in it and was chilled: not understand- 
ing quite what he missed, but chilled, disappointed none 
the less. 

Barring the Merchant himself, a merely static figure. 



80 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

and Shylock, who is meant to be cruel, every one of the 
Venetian dramatis personw is either a ' waster ' or a 
' rotter ' or both, and cold-hearted at that. There is no 
need to expend ink upon such parasites as surround An- 
tonio — upon Salarino and Salanio. Be it granted that in 
the hour of his extremity they have no means to save him. 
Yet they see it coming; they discuss it sympathetically, 
but always on the assumption that it is his affair — 

Let good Antonio look he keep his day. 
Or he shall pay for this, 

and they take not so much trouble as to send Bassanio 
word of his friend's plight, though they know that for 
Bassanio's sake his deadly peril has been incurred! It 
is left to Antonio himself to tell the news in that very 
noble letter of farewell and release: 

Sweet Bassanio: My ships have all miscarried, my creditors grow 
cruel, my estate is very low, my bond to the Jew is forfeit; and 
since in paying it it is impossible I should live, all debts are cleared 
between you and I, if I might but see you at my death. Notwith- 
standing, use your pleasure: if your love do not persuade you to 
come, let not my letter. 

— a letter which, in good truth, Bassanio does not too 
extravagantly describe as "a few of the unpleasant'st 
words that ever blotted paper." Let us compare it with 
Salarino's account of how the friends had parted: 

I saw Bassanio and Antonio part: 
Bassanio told him he would make some speed 
Of his return: he answer'd, "Do not so; 
Slubber not business for my sake, Bassanio, 
But stay the very riping of the time; 



THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 81 

And for the Jew's bond which he hath of me. 

Let it not enter in your mind of love: 

Be merry; and employ your chief est thoughts 

To courtship, and such fair ostents of love 

As shall conveniently become you there " : 

And even there/ his eye being big with tears. 

Turning his face, he put his hand behind him, 

And with affection wondrous sensible 

He wrung Bassanio's hand: and so they parted. 

But let US consider this conquering hero, Bassanio. 
When we first meet him he is in debt, a condition on 
which — having to confess it because he wants to borrow 
more money — he expends some very choice diction. 

'Tia not unknown to you, Antonio, 
(No, it certainly was not!) 

How much I have disabled mine estate 
I By something showing a more swelling port 
Than my faint means would grant continuance. 

That may be a mighty fine way of saying that you have 
chosen to live beyond your income; but, Shakespeare or 
no Shakespeare, if Shakespeare mean us to hold Bas- 
sanio for an honest fellow, it is mighty poor poetry. 
For poetry, like honest men, looks things in the face, and 
does not ransack its wardrobe to clothe what is naturally 
unpoetical. Bassanio, to do him justice, is not trying to 
wheedle Antonio by this sort of talk ; he knows his friend 
too deeply for that. But he is deceiving himself, or 
rather is reproducing some of the trash with which he 
has already deceived himself. 

* Let the reader note this " there," so subtly repeated that we see 
the man turning on the spot and on the word together. 



82 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

He goes on to say tliat he is not repining; his chief 
anxiety is to pay everybody, and 

To you, Antonio, 
I owe the most, in money and in love; 

and thereupon counts on more love to extract more 
money, starting (and upon an experienced man of busi- 
ness, be it observed) with some windy nonsense about 
shooting a second arrow after a lost one. 

You know me well; and herein spend but time 
To wind about my love with circumstance, 

says Antonio ; and, indeed, his gentle impatience through- 
out this scene is well worth noting. He is friend enough 
already to give all ; but to be preached at, and on a sub- 
ject — money — of which he has forgotten, or chooses to 
forget, ten times more than Bassanio will ever learn, is a 
little beyond bearing. And what is Bassanio's project? 
To borrow three thousand ducats to equip himself to go 
off and hunt an heiress in Belmont ! He has seen her ; she 
is fair; and 

Sometimes from her eyes 
I did receive fair speechless messages. . . . 
Nor is the wide world ignorant of her worth; 
For the four winds blow in from every coast 
Eenowned suitors; and her sunny locks 
Hang on her temples like a golden fleece; 
Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchos' strand. 
And many Jasons come in quest of her. 

my Antonio, had I but the means 

To hold a rival place with one of them, 

1 have a mind presages me such thrift 
That I should questionless be fortunate! 



THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 83 

"Now this is bad workmanship and dishonouring to Bas- 
sanio. It suggests the obvious question, Why should he 
build anything on Portia's encouraging glances, as why 
should he " questionless be fortunate," seeing that — as he 
knows perfectly well, but does not choose to confide to 
the friend whose money he is borrowing — Portia's glances, 
encouraging or not, are nothing to the purpose, since all 
depends on his choosing the right one of three caskets — 
a two to one chance against him ? 

But he gets the money, of course, equips himself lav- 
ishly, arrives at Belmont ; and here comes in worse work- 
manship. Por I suppose that, while character weighs in 
drama, if one thing be more certain than another it is 
that a predatory young gentleman such as Bassanio would 
not have chosen the leaden casket. I do not know how his 
soliloquy while choosing affects the reader : 

The world is still deceiv'd with ornament, 
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt. 
But, being season'd with a gracious voice. 
Obscures the show of evil? In religion, 
What damned error, but some sober brow 
Will bless it, and approve it with a text, 

— ^but I feel moved to interrupt : " Yes, yes — and what 
about yourself, my little fellow? What has altered you, 
that you, of all men, start talking as though you addressed 
a Young Men's Christian Association ? " 

And this flaw in characterisation goes right down 
through the workmanship of the play. For the evil op- 
posed against these curious Christians is specific; it is 
Cruelty; and, yet again specifically, the peculiar cruelty 
lof a Jew. To this cruelty an artist at the top of his 



84. SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

art would surely have opposed mansuetude, clemency, 
charity, and, specifically. Christian charity. Shake- 
speare misses more than half the point when he makes 
the intended victims, as a class and by habit, just as 
heartless as Shylock without any of Shylock's passion- 
ate excuse. It is all very well for Portia to strike an at- 
titude and tell the court and the world that 

The quality of mercy is not strain'd: 
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven. . . ,. 

But these high-professing words are words and no more 
to us, who find that, when it comes to her turn and the 
court's turn, Shylock gets but the " mercy " of being 
allowed (1) to pay half his estate in fine, (2) to settle 
the other half on 

the gentleman 
That lately stole his daughter, 

and (3) to turn Christian. (Being such Christians as the 
whole gang were, they might have spared him that igno- 
miny !) Moreover, with such an issue set out squarely in 
open court, I do not think that any of us can be satisfied 
with Portia's victory, won by legal quibbles as fantastic 
as anything in Alice in Wonderland; since, after all, 
prosecution and defence have both been presented to us 
as in deadly earnest. And I have before now let fancy 
play on the learned Bellario's emotions when report 
reached him of what his impulsive niece had done with 
the notes and the garments he had lent to her. Indeed, 



THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 85 

a learned Doctor of another University than Padua scorn- 
fully summed up this famous scene to me, the other day, 
as a set-to between a Jew and a SuflFragette. 

Why are these Venetians so empty-hearted? I should 
like to believe — and the reader may believe it if he will — 
that Shakespeare was purposely making his Venice a 
picture of the hard, shallow side of the Kenaissance, 
even as in Richard III he gives us a stiff conventional 
portrait of a Eenaissance scoundrel ("I am determined 
to be a villain "), of the Italianate Englishman who was 
proverbially a devil incarnate. He certainly knew all 
about it; and in that other Venetian play, Othello, he 
gives us a real tragedy of two passionate, honest hearts 
entrapped in that same milieu of cold, practised, subtle 
malignity. I should like to believe, further, that against 
this Venice he consciously and deliberately opposed Bel- 
mont (the Hill Beautiful) as the residence of that better 
part of the Kenaissance, its ' humanities,' its adora- 
tion of beauty, its wistful dream of a golden age. It is, 
at any rate,- observable in the play that— whether under 
the spell of Portia or from some other cause — nobody ar- 
rives at Belmont who is not instantly and marvellously 
the better for it; and this is no less true of Bassanio 
than of Lorenzo and Jessica and Gratiano. All the • 
suitors, be it remarked — Morocco and Aragon no less 
than Bassanio — address themselves nobly to the trial and 
take their fate nobly. If this be what Shakespeare meant 
by Belmont, we can read a great deal into Portia's first 
words to !N"erissa in Act v as, reaching home again, she 
emerges on the edge of the dark shrubbery— 



86 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

That light we see is burning in my hall. 
How far that little candle throws his beams! 
So shines a good deed in a naughty world. 

— a nauglity world: a world that is naught, having no 
heart. 

It were pleasant (I say) to suppose this naughtiness, 
this moral emptiness of Venice, deliberately intended. 
But another consideration comes in. 

(2) 

Any school manual will recite for us the ' sources ' of 
The Merchant of Venice. Briefly, we all know that it 
intertwists three plots of intrigue; and we -need not vex 
ourselves here with their origins, because they are nothing 
to our purpose. We have: 

Plot I. The story of the Jew and the pound of flesh. 

Plot II. The story of the caskets. 

Plot III. The intrigue of the exchanged rings. 

To this summary I but append two remarks. The first, 
obvious to anybody, is that Plots I and II, the pound of 
flesh and the caskets, are monstrous and incredible; the 
pound of flesh business starkly inhuman, the casket busi- 
ness scarcely more plausible when we examine it. Be it 
granted that, as !N"erissa says, " holy men at their death 
have good inspirations." Yet this profound reason 
scarcely covers Portia's father, since in point of fact 
his device gave his daughter to a lucky fortune-hunter. 
Ulrici, like Portia's father, had a good inspiration; 
he divined that Shakespeare " showed consummate art 
in introducing one improbability, that of the caskets, 
to balance and, as it were, excuse the other improbability, 



THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 87 

that of the pound of flesh"! The third intrigue — that 
of the exchanged rings — is mere light comedy. 

For my other remark: In Stephen Gosson's Schoole of 
Abuse, an invective against stage plays by a playwright 
turned Puritan, published in 1579 — when Shakespeare 
was a boy of fifteen and before he had written a line — 
there occurs an allusion to a play called The Jew and 
described as " representing the greediness of worldly 
chosers and bloody mind of usurers." These coinci- 
dent phrases — " The Jew," " The gi-eediness of worldly 
chosers," " the bloody mind of usurers," — indicate a 
play on the very lines of The Merchant of Venice, and 
tell us, as well as such casual evidence can, (1) that 
Shakespeare was refurbishing an old play, (2) that the 
two themes of the pound of flesh and the caskets had 
already been combined in that play before Shakespeare 
ever took it in hand to improve it. 

Reading this into Gosson's allusion, we see Shakespeare 
tackling, as a workman, an old piece of work which al- 
ready included two monstrous, incredible stories. Even 
if we rule out Gosson, we see Shakespeare about to com- 
bine in one play these two monstrous, incredible stories, 
plus a third which is an intrigue of light comedy separate 
from both. 

It does not matter to which alternative we incline. 
With either of them Shakespeare's first task as an artist 
'(as any artist will tell us) was to distract attention from 
the monstrosities and absurdities in the plot. I shall 
return to this. 



88 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

(3) 

For the moment I postpone it, to consider another 
necessity. Every artist knows, and every critic from 
Aristotle down, that the more you complicate your plot 
— ^the more threads you tie together in your nexus — the 
less room you leave yourself for invention and play of 
character. That is ABC; and it is almost ABC that 
with three entanglements in hand — one inhuman, two in- 
credible, one fantastic — and three hours to do your trick 
in — you almost exclude your chance of working seriously 
upon character. 

Shakespeare had two outlets only, and he took full ad- 
vantage of both. I rule out Antonio, who, as I said, is 
merely static. He is made, and rightly, the pivot of the 
action (and drama is, by its very name, dynamic). But 
the pivot is inert ; he himself scarcely lifts a hand. 

There remain Shylock and Portia, who do the work. 

I am going to say very little upon Shylock, who, to 
my thinking, has been over-philosophised and yet more 
drearily over-sentimentalised. Charles Kean or Macklin 
began it. Irving completed (I hope) what they began. 
Heine, himself a Jew, tells how in a box at Drury Lane 
he sat next to " a pale, fair Briton who at the end of 
the fourth Act fell a-weeping p^issionately, several times 
exclaiming, ' the poor man is wronged ! ' " ; and Heine goes 
on to return the compliment in better coin, with talk 
about " a ripple of tears that were never wept by eyes 
... a sob that could come only from a breast that held 
in it the martyrdom endured for eighteen centuries hj^ 
a whole tortured people." 

That is all very well. Few of us doubt that Shake- 



THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 89 

speare often wrote greater than he knew; that he is what 
we can read into him. But the point is that he started 
out to make Shylock such a cruel, crafty, villainous He- 
brew as would appeal to an audience of Elizabethan 
Christians. The very structure of the plot shows that. 

Every author knows how a character of his inven- 
tion will sometimes take charge of him; as every reader 
must recognise and own in Shakespeare an imagination 
so warm, so large, so human, so catholic, that it could not, 
creating even a Caliban, help sympathising with Cali- 
ban's point of view. So it is with Ealstaff ; and so it is with 
Shylock. As I see Shylock, he takes charge of his creator, 
fenced in by intricacies of plot and finding outlets for 
his genius where he can. Shakespeare so far sympathises 
that, even in detail, the language of Shylock is perfect. 
I think it was Hazlitt who noted the fine Hebraism of 
his phrase when he hears that his runaway daughter 
has given in Genoa a ring to purchase a monkey : 

Thou torturest me, Tubal! It was my turquoise: I had it of 
Leah when I was a bachelor: I would not have given it for a 
wilderness of monkeys. 

Let US open our Bible for comparison, say, at the first 
i chapter of Isaiah: 

And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a 
' lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city. 
I 
. Supposing ourselves lodged in a garden of cucumbers, 

what could we more appropriately overlook, beyond its 

fence, than a wilderness of monkeys ? 

It is curious to reflect that Shakespeare most likely had 

never seen a Jew in his life. 



90 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

(4) 
Let us turn to Portia, the only other character into 
■whose soul the pleached fence of the plot permits Shake- 
speare to expatiate. Hazlitt says, " Portia is not a very 
great favourite with us. . . . Portia has a certain 
degree of affectation and pedantry about her, vs^hich is very 
unusual in Shakespeare's women." Pedantry, or a touch 
of it, she must have in the Trial Scene. It is a part of 
the plot. But — " affectation " ? Let us for a moment 
dismiss that importunate Trial Scene from our minds and 
listen to these lovely lines, in which she gives herself, 
utterly, without low bargaining, as Shakespeare's ador- 
able women always do, out of confessed weakness spring- 
ing to invincibility: 

You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand, 

Such as I am: though for myself alone 

I would not be ambitious in my wish. 

To wish myself much better; yet, for you, 

I would be trebled twenty times myself; 

A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times 

More rich; 

That only to stand high in your account, 

I might in virtues, beauties, livings, friends. 

Exceed account; but the full sum of me 

Is sum of — something: which, to terms in gross, 

Is an unlesson'd girl, unschool'd, unpractis'd; 

Happy in this, she is not yet so old 

But she may learn: happier than this, 

She is not bred so dull but she can learn; 

Happiest of all is that her gentle spirit 

Commits itself to yours to be directed 

As from her lord, her governor, her king. 

Myself and what is mine to you and yours 

Is now converted: but now I was the lord 

Of this fair mansion, master of my servants. 

Queen o'er myself : and even now, but now. 



THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 91 

This house, these servants, and this same myself 
Are yours, my lord; I givethem with this ring — 

This, by the way, is the first we hear of the ring; and 
we may observe how cunningly Shakespeare foists on us 
this new card, a moment after he has finished with the 
caskets. For though he runs three plots in The Merchant 
of Venice, he runs but two at a time. Indeed, he does 
not actually get to work on this plot of the ring (or, 
rather, of the rings) until Act iv. Scene 1, line 426, 
at the very moment again when the pound of flesh plot 
is played out and done with. But here we are prepared 
for it: 

I give them with this ring: 
Which when you part from, lose, or give away. 
Let it presage the ruin of your love, 
And be my vantage to exclaim on you. 

" A girl's fancy ? — a caprice ? " we ask ourselves, noting 
a thought too much of emphasis laid on this trifle. Yet, 
after all, if Portia choose to make it a token of the much 
she is giving, why should she not ? So we let it pass, to 
remember it later on. 

But when we consider the body of this speech of 
Portia's (far more beautiful, with the reader's leave, than 
her more famous one on the quality of mercy, line by 
line flowing straight from a clean heart) and compare it 
with Bassanio's trash about his debts, surely our instinct 
discriminates between things that poetic language can, 
and things it cannot, dignify. 

I regret to add that William Collins, author of the 
Ode to Evening (a poem which I worship " on this side 
idolatry"), uttered, comparing him with Fletcher, the 



92 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

most fatuous observation pronounced upon Shakespeare 
by any critic, living or dead or German. In his Epistle 
to Sir Thomas Hanmer he actually wrote: 

Of softer mould the gentle Fletcher came. 

The next in order as the next in name. 

With pleas'd attention 'midst his scenes we find 

Each glowing thought that warms the female mind; 

Each melting sigh, and every tended tear. 

The lover's wishes and the virgin's fear, 

His every strain the Smiles and Graces own : 

But stronger Shakespeare felt for men alone. 

A man who has said that deserves, on either side of the 
grave, the worst he can get, which is to have it repeated. 
Portia, indeed, is the earliest portrait in Shakespeare's 
long gallery of incomparable women. We can feel her 
charm at the full only if we get the Trial Scene back to 
its right focus. We then see what was amiss with Hazlitt, 
for instance, when he grumbled over " a certain degree 
of affectation and pedantry about her . . . which per- 
haps was a proper qualification for the office of a civil 
doctor." He had the Trial Scene in his eye. Now all 
star actors and actresses tend to exaggerate the sig- 
nificance of this scene, because it gives them an unrivalled 
occasion to exploit, as Portia or as Shylock, their person- 
alities, their picturesqueness, their declamatory powers — 
Shylock, whetting his knife on his boot, Portia publicly 
outmanning man, yet in garments decorously ample. 
Worse, far worse! it has become the happiest hunting- 
ground of the amateur. 

There ought to be a close time for this scene. I grant 
it to be the crisis of the action. But it has been sentimen- 
talised and sophisticated until we can scarcely see the 



THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 93 

rest of the play ; and I, for one, long hated the rest of the 
play for its sake. 

Here I take up and continue the personal confession. 
Some four or five years ago I had to stage-manage The 
Merchant of Venice. This meant that for two good 
months I lived in it and thought about little else. Hav- 
ing once achieved the difficult but necessary feat of 
getting the Trial Scene back into focus, I found a 
sense of the workmanship growing in me, and increas- 
ing to something like amazement: in the midst of 
which certain things new to me emerged and became 
clear. 

Of these I beg to offer my report. 

(1) To begin with, for purpose of the report — 
though in fact and in time it came about last of my little 
discoveries — Shakespeare was working upon that old 
play alluded to by Gosson, which combined the two in- 
credible stories of the pound of flesh and the caskets. 
He started with his hands tied. 

(2) He started, as in such hap every artist must, with 
one paramount object — to distract our attention from the 
monstrous absurdity of the story. ITow let us mark with 
what ingenuity he does it. AH artists know it for an 
axiom that if you are setting out to tell the incredible, 
nothing will serve you so well as to open with absolute 
realism. With this axiom in mind, let us consider the 
first scene of this play. There is nothing about any 
pound of flesh in it ! Still more astonishing, while the 
adventure to win Portia is propounded and discussed, 



94 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

there is not a word about caskets! By the end of the 
scene Shakespeare has impressed on our minds : — 

(a) That we are dealing with people as real as 
ourselves ; 

(&) that Antonio, a rich merchant, has so deep 
an affection for young Bassanio that he will forget all 
business caution to help him; 
and (c) — cunningest of all, when later we look hack 
— that this man of affairs, rather deeply involved, 
gets very anxious without knowing quite why. The 
reader goes on to note how it increases Antonio's hold 
on us when he shakes off all his own melancholy at the 
first hint of helping his friend. 

As for the pound of flesh, we next observe how Shy- 
lock in Scene 3 slides it in under cover of a jest. By 
this time Shakespeare has us at his mercy ; all the charac- 
ters are so real to us that we have no choice but to accept 
all the incredibilities to come. And, meanwhile and more- 
over, all the stage for those incredibilities has been set 
in Antonio's opening confession: 

In sooth I know not why I am so sad, 

and Bassanio's other premonition, as with a start of fear — 

I like not fair terms and a villain's mind. 

" Come on," Antonio reassures him heartily — he is the 
cheerful one now, forgetful of self and his own premoni- 
tions — 

Come on! in this there can be no dismay: 
My ships come home a month before the day. 

(3) Launcelot Gobbo is patently own brother and 
twin to Launce of The Two Gentlemen of Veronaj and I 



THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 96 

think him no improvement on Launce. But if we fol- 
low back that hint and turn the pages of the earlier play, 
we soon begin to rub our eyes. Inured as we are to 
Shakespeare's habit of economising his material, of turn- 
ing old plots, tricks, situations to new uses, his " rifac- 
ciamenting" (if I may coin the word) of The Two 
Gentlemen of Verona in The Merchant of Venice is auda- 
cious. For a sample, compare the two early scenes in 
which the two heroines discuss their lovers; while, as 
for the main device of The Two Gentlemen of Verona — 
the heroine in mannish disguise — in The Merchant of 
Venice there are but three female characters, and they 
all don man's clothes! 

(4) " This is a play," wrote Hazlitt, " that in spite 
of the change of manners still holds undisputed posses- 
sion of the stage." It does yet; and yet on the stage, 
sophisticated by actors, it had always vexed me, until, 
coming to live with an acting version, I came to track 
the marvellous stage-cleverness of it all; when, in revul- 
sion, I grew impatient with all judgments of Shakespeare 
passed on the mere reading of him. This had happened 
to me before with The Taming of the Shrew — a play 
noisier in the study than on the stage; strident, setting 
the teeth on edge; odious, until acted; when it straight- 
way becomes not only tolerable, but pleasant, and not 
only pleasant, but straightforwardly effective. In par- 
ticular, I had to own of The Merchant of Venice that 
the lines which really told on the stage were lines the 
reader passes by casually, not pausing to take their im- 
pression. It fairly surprised me, for an example, that 
Lorenzo's famous speech in the last Act — about the music 



96 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

and the moonlight and the stars — though well delivered, 
carried less weight than four little words of Portia's. 

(5) And this brings me to the last Act, so often dis- 
cussed. It became plain to me that Shakespeare had 
made at least one attempt at it before satisfying himself; 
as plain as that, if we resolutely hold the Trial Scene 
back to focus, this finish becomes the most delightful Act 
in the play. 

That Shakespeare tried other ways is made evident by 
one line. Upon Lorenzo's and Jessica's lovely duet there 
breaks a footfall. Lorenzo, startled by it, demands — 

Who comes so fast in the silence of the night? 

Voice. A friend. 

Lorengo. A friend? What friend? Your name, I pray you. 
Friend? [Stephana enters.] 

Stephana. Stephano is my name; and I bring word 
My mistress will before the break of day 
Be here at Belmont; she doth stray about 
By holy crosses, where she kneels and prays 
For happy wedlock hours. 

Lorenzo. Who comes with her? 

Stephano. None but a holy hermit, and her maid. . . . 

l*[othing loose in literature — in play or in poem — ever 
caught Dr. Johnson napping. " I do not perceive," says 
Johnson, in his unfaltering accent, " the use of this her- 
mit, of whom nothing is seen or heard afterwards. The 
Poet had first planned his fable some other way ; and 
inadvertently, when he changed his scheme, retained 
something of the original design." 

But the fifth Act, as Shakespeare finally gives it to 
us, is lovely past compare, even after professionals have 
done their worst on the Trial Scene. l!^ay, whatever 
they did or omitted, the atmosphere of the Doge's court 



THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 97 

was thunderous, heavily charged; after all, a good man's 
life was at stake, and we have hung on the lips of the 
pleaders. We have to be won back to a saner, happier 
acceptance of life ; and so we are, by gracious, most play- 
ful comedy. It is all absurd, if we please. The unseal- 
ing of a letter telling Antonio, to make joy complete, that 

Three of your argosies 
Are richly come to harbour suddenly, 

is unbelievable. 

" You shall not know," Portia adds — 

You shall not know by what strange accident 
I chanced on this letter. 

No ; nor any one else ! It is absurd as the conclusion of 
The Vicar of Wakefield. Yet it is not more absurd than 
the ending of most fairy-tales. 

And while all this has been passing, the moon has 
sunk and every thicket around Belmont has begun to 
thrill and sing of dawn. Portia lifts a hand. 

It is almost morning. ... 
Let UB go in — 



CHAPTER VI 
AS YOU LIKE IT 

Lodge's Rosalynde, and the Tale of Oamelyn — The Forest of Arden 
— Its site on the Avon — A fantasy in colour — Jaques and Touchstone 
— A fantastic criticism of life — Playing at Robin Hood — Swinburne 
and George Sand — The influence of Lyly — A piece of botchwork. 

(1) 

For tlie actual plot of As You Like It we have not to 
seek very far. Shakespeare took his story from a con- 
temporary novel, Rosalynde, Euphues' Golden Legacie, 
written by Thomas Lodge and first published in 1590. 
Lodge derived a good part of his story from the Tale 
of Gamelyn, included in some MSS. of the Canterbury 
Tales, but certainly not written by Chaucer and probably 
packed by him among his papers as material for the 
Yeoman's Tale which he never wrote.^ 

* On this I cannot do better than quote Professor Skeat: 
" Some have supposed, with great reason, that this tale occurs 
among the rest because it is one which Chaucer intended to recast, 
although, in fact, he did not live to rewrite a single line of it. Thia 
is the more likely because the tale is a capital one in itself, well 
worthy of being rewritten even by so great a poet; indeed, it la 
well known that the plot of the favourite play known to us all by 
the title of As You Like It was derived from it at second-hand. 
But I cannot but protest against the stupidity of the botcher whose 
hand wrote above it, 'The Coke's Tale of Gamelyn.' This waa 
done because it happened to be found next after the ' Coke's Tale.' 
. . . The fitness of things ought to show at once that this ' Tale 
of Gamelyn,' a tale of the woods in true Robin Hood style, could 
only have been placed in the mouth of him 'who bare a mighty 

98 



AS YOU LIKE IT 99 

The Tale of Gamelyn (as the reader may rememher) 
runs in this fashion : 

Litheth and lesteneth || and herkeneth aright, 

And ye schulle heere a talking || of a doughty knight; 

Sire Johan of Boundys || waa his righte name . . . 

and he leaves three sons. The eldest, succeeding to the 
estate, misuses the youngest brother, who triumphs in a 
wrestling-bout and, escaping to the greenwood with an 
old retainer, Adam the Spencer, becomes an outlaw. 
The eldest brother, Johan, as sheriff, pursues him — ^just 
as the proud sheriff of ISTottingham pursues Eobin 
Hood. He is taken, and bailed; returns, in ballad-fash- 
ion (like the Heir of Linne, for example), just in time 
to save his bail, and the wicked Johan is sent to the 
gallows. 

Upon this artless ballad Lodge tacked and embroidered 
a love-story — of an exiled King of France and of his 
daughter, Rosalind, who falls in love with the young 
wrestler, and escapes with the usurper's daughter Aliena 
(Celia) to the greenwood. As in the play, the usurper's 
daughter becomes " Aliena " and Eosalind disguises her- 
self as a page and calls herself " Ganymede." The name 
of the faithful old retainer, "Adam," persists down 
from The Tale of Gamelyn to "As You Like It, and is 
the name of the character which (tradition says) Shake- 
speare as an actor personated in his own play. 

bow,' and who knew all the ways of wood-craft; in one word, of 
the Yeoman. . . . And we get hence the additional hint, that the 
Yeoman's Tale was to have followed the Coke's Tale, a tale of fresh 
country life succeeding one of the close back-streets of the city. No 
better place could be found for it." 



100 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

(2) 

So much for the source of the plot. But the plot of 
As You Like It is no great matter. Indeed, I would 
point out that by the end of Act i it is practically over 
and done with. With the opening of Act ii we reach the 
Forest of Arden; and thenceforth, like the exiled Duke 
and his followers, we " fleet the time carelessly, as they 
did in the golden world." But let me quote the whole 
of Charles the Wrestler's answer to Oliver's question, 
" Where will the old Duke live ? " ; for in some five lines 
it gives us not only the Eobin Hood and Gamelyn tradi- 
tion of the story but the atmosphere in which Shake- 
speare is to clothe it: 

They say he is already in the forest of Arden, and a many merry 
men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of 
England: they say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, 
and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world. 

" They say . . . they say " — I note those two tJiey 
says, to return to them anon. For the moment let us 
be content to mark that no sooner do we arrive at the 
fringe of this forest with the other fugitives (and I break 
off to remark that they all in turn reach it dead-beat. 
Sighs Rosalind, " O Jupiter, how weary are my spirits ! " 
invoking Jupiter as a Ganymede should. Touchstone re- 
torts, " I care not for my spirits, if my legs were not 
weary"; and Celia entreats, " I pray you, bear with me; 
I cannot go further " : as, later on, old Adam echoes, 
" Dear master, I can go no further " ; and again, we 
remember, Oliver arrives footsore, in rags, and stretches 
himself to sleep, so dog-tired that even a snake, coil- 
ing about his throat, fails to awaken him. It is only 



AS YOU LIKE IT 101 

the young athlete Orlando who bears the journey well) 
— I say that the fugitives, and we too, no sooner win 
to the forest than life is found to have changed its values 
for us, as it has awhile already for the Duke and his 
followers. Henceforth we hear next to nothing of the 
usurping Duke Ferdinand and his court, and we care 
less. We have left him behind. He is not suffered again 
to obtrude his person, and in the last Act we learn of 
ihis repentance but by report: 

Duke Frederick, hearing how that every day 
Men of great worth resorted to this forest, 
Address'd a mighty power; which were on foot. 
In his own conduct, purposely to take 
His brother here and put him to the sword: 
And to the skirts of this wild wood he came; 
Where meeting with an old religious man. 
After some question with him, was converted 
Both from his enterprise and from the world; 
His crown bequeathing to his banish'd brother, 
And all their lands restor'd to them again 
That were with him exil'd. 

" I do not perceive the use of this hermit," says Dr. 
Johnson of the holy man introduced with very similar 
abruptness into the last Act of The Merchant of Venice. 
I venture to echo it of this intruder upon the last Act of 
As You Like It. Whoso lists may believe in him. But 
who cares ? 

The wicked brother Oliver is even more violently con- 
verted to a right frame of mind, by means of a snake and 
a lion. We are not shown it. We don't want to see it: 
we take his word for it, and quite cheerfully, in spite 
of its monstrous improbability. For, again, who cares? 
We are fleeting the time carelessly ; we are " not at 



102 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

home " to him, hut engaged with Rosalind's wooing, 
Touchstone's amorous vagaries with his Audrey, the pure 
pastoral of Silvius and Phebe, Jaques' moralising, the 
killing of the deer, food and song beneath the bough. 

(3) 

Some years ago, in hope to get a better understanding 
of Shakespeare, a friend and I tracked the Warwickshire 
Avon together, from its source on ISTaseby battlefield down 
to Tewkesbury, where, by a yet more ancient battlefield, 
it is gathered to the greater Severn. From ISTaseby, where 
we found its source among the " good cabbage " of an 
inn-garden, we followed it afoot through " wide-skirted 
meads," past " poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes and 
farms," to Rugby. This upper region of Avon undulates 
in long ridge and furrow divided by stiff ox-fences (the 
" bull-finches " of the fox-hunter — for this is the famoua 
Pytchley country) ; and in Shakespeare's time these same 
ridges and furrows were mainly planted with rye. We 
went down through this pastoral heart of England, where 
yet (as Avon draws the line between her north and her 
south) so many of her bloody internal battles have been 
decided — ^Bosworth and ISTaseby by her headwaters, Eve- 
sham and Tewkesbury by her lower fords. At Rugby we 
took ship : that is to say, we launched a canoe. 

I am pretty sure she was the first ever launched upon 
Avon from Rugby since many a long year. A small curi- 
ous crowd bore murmured testimony to this. The Avon is 
not — or was not in those days — a pleasure stream. You 
might meet a few boats, above Warwick, a few at Strat- 
ford. Ear lower down, below Stratford, the river was 



AS YOU LIKE IT 103 

made navigable in 1637. But the locks are decayed, and 
the waterway disused. I suppose that, along its extent, 
half the few houses by this most lovely river resolutely 
turn their back-gardens on it. 

On the second day, after much pulling through reed 
beds and following for many miles Avon's always lei- 
surely meanders, we ported over Bubbenhall weir, fetched 
north-east, then south-east, and came to the upper bridge 
of Stoneleigh Deer Park. 

A line of swinging deer-fences hung from the arches 
of the bridge, the river trailing through their bars. We, 
having permission, pushed cautiously under these — ^which 
in a canoe was not easy. Beyond the barrier we looked 
to right and left, amazed. We had passed from a slug- 
gish brook, twisting among water-plants and willows, to a 
pleasant river, expanding down between wide lawns, by 
slopes of bracken, by the roots of gigantic trees — oaks, 
Spanish oaks, wych-elms, stately firs, sweet chestnuts, 
backed by filmy larch coppices. 

This was Arden, the forest of Arden, nominally to-day 
' Stoneleigh-in-Arden,' and, of old, Shakespeare's very 
Arden. 

As we rested on our paddles, down to a shallow ahead — 
their accustomed ford, no doubt — a herd of deer came 
daintily and charged across, splashing; first the bucks, in 
single file, then the does in a body. The very bed of 
Avon changes just here: the river now brawling by a 
shallow, now sliding over slabs of sandstone. 

This (I repeat) is verily and historically Arden. We 
know that Arden — a lovely word in itself — was endeared 
to Shakespeare by scores of boyish memories ; Arden was 



104 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

his motlier's maiden name. I tbink it arguable of the 
greatest creative artists that, however much they learn and 
however far they improve, they still trade on the stored 
memories of childhood. I am sure that, as Shakespeare 
turned the pages of Lodge's Rosalynde, — as sure as if my 
ears heard him, — he cried to himself, " Arden? This made 
to happen in a Forest of Arden, in France? But I have 
wandered in a Forest of Arden ten times lovelier; and, 
translated thither, ten times lovelier shall be the tale! " 

And he is in such a hurry to get to it ! 

The opening Act of ^s You Like It (we shall find) 
abounds in small negligences, oversights of detail. Rosa- 
lind is taller than Celia in one passage, shorter in another : 
a name, " Jaques," is bestowed on an unimportant char- 
acter, forgotten, and later used again for an important 
one : in one passage there is either confusion in the names 
of the two Dukes, exiled and regnant, or the words are 
given to the wrong speaker. Orlando's protasis is a mere 
stage trick ; and the persiflage between Rosalind and Celia 
has a false sparkle. Actually it is dull, level chop-logic; 
repetitive in the rhythm of its sentences. Indeed, the 
whole of the language of this Act, when we weigh it care- 
fully, is curiously monotonous. It affects to be sprightly, 
but lacks true wit. Until he gets to Arden, Touchstone 
never finds himself. All goes to show that Shakespeare, 
while laying out his plot, was impatient of it and ardent 
for Arden. 

iRow, in Stoneleigh Deer Park in Arden I saw the 
whole thing, as though Corin's crook moved above the 
ferns and Orlando's ballads fluttered on the boles. There 
was the very oak beneath which Jaques moralised on the 



AS YOU LIKE IT 105 

deer — a monster oak, thirty-nine feet around (for I meas- 
ured it) — not far above the ford across which the herd had 
splashed, its " antique roots " writhing over the red sand- 
stone rock down to the water's brim. And I saw the 
whole thing for what the four important Acts of it really 
are — not as a drama, but as a dream, or rather a dreamy 
delicious fantasy, and especially a fantasy in colour. 

(4) 

I want to make this plain: and that the play, not my 
criticism, is fanciful. I had always thought of As You 
Like It — most adorable play of boyhood, in those days 
not second even to The Tempest — in terms of colour. 

Shakespeare, improving on Lodge, invented Jaques and 
Touchstone. Both are eminently piquant figures under 
the forest boughs ; both piquantly out of place, while most 
picturesquely in place ; both critics, and contrasted critics, 
of the artificial-natural life ("the simple life" is our 
term nowadays) in which the exiled Duke and his cour- 
tiers profess themselves to revel. Hazlitt says of Jaques 
that " he is the only purely contemplative character in 
Shakespeare." Well, with much more going on about 
him, Horatio, in Hamlet, is just as inactive^ — the static, 
philosophical man, the punctuni indifferens set in the 
midst of tragic aberrations. This function of the critic 
amid the comic aberrations of As You Like It, Jaques 
and Touchstone share between them. Jaques moralises ; 
Touchstone comments and plays the fool, his commentary 
enlightening common sense, his folly doing common sense 
no less service by consciously caricaturing all prevalent 
folly around it. 



106 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

As contrast of character indicated hy colour, can 
we conceive anything better than Jaques' sad-hued 
habit opposed to Touchstone's gay motley? With what a 
whoop of delight the one critic happens on the other ! — 

Jaques. A fool, — a fool! I met a fool i' the forest, 
A motley fool; a miserable world! 
As I do live by food, I met a fool; 
Who laid him down and bask'd him in the sun. 
And rail'd on Lady Fortune in good terms. 
In set good terms, and yet a motley fool. 
" Good morrow, fool," quoth I. " No, sir," quoth he, 
" Call me not fool till heaven hath sent me fortune " : 
And then he drew a dial from his poke. 
And looking on it with lack-lustre eye, 
Saya very wisely, "It is ten o'clock: 
Thus we may see," quoth he, " how the world wags : 
'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine; 
And after one hour more, 'twill be eleven; 
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe. 
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; 
And thereby hangs a tale." When I did hear 
The motley fool thus moral on the time. 
My lungs began to crow like chanticleer, 
That fools should be so deep contemplative; 
And I did laugh sans intermission 
An hour by his dial. O noble fool! 
A worthy fool! Motley's the only wear. 

Duke S. What fool is this? 

Jaques. . . . One that hath been a courtier, 

And says, if ladies be but young and fair. 
They have the gift to know it: and in his brain. 
Which is as dry as the remainder biscuit 
After a voyage, he hath strange places cramm'd 
With observation, the which he vents 
In mangled forms. O that I were a fool! 
I am ambitious for a motley coat. 

Well then, to pass from Jaques' to our own appreciation 
of motley, can we not see Touchstone's suit — scarlet, we 
will say, down one side, and green down the other — illus- 



I 



AS YOU LIKE IT 107 

trating his own contrast of wit and conduct, in speech 
after speech! Take, for example, his answer to Corin's 
query, " And how like you this shepherd's life. Master 
Touchstone 1 " and watch him exhibiting one side of his 
motley, then the other: 

Truly, shepherd, in respect of itself, it is a good life; but in 
respect that it is a shepherd's life, it is naught. In respect that 
it is solitary, I like it very well; but in respect that it is private, 
it is a very vile life. Now, in respect it is in the fields, it pleaseth 
me well; but in respect it is not in the court, it is tedious. As 
it is a spare life, look you, it suits my humour; but as there is 
no more plenty in it, it goes much against my stomach. 

(5) 

The comedy, then, is less a comedy of dramatic event 
than a playful fantastic criticism of life: wherein, a 
courtly society being removed to the greenwood, to picnic 
there, the Duke Senior can gently moralise on the 
artificiality he has left at home, and his courtiers — ^being 
courtiers still, albeit loyal ones — must ape his humours. 
But this in turn, being less than sincere, needs salutary 
mockery: wherefore Shakespeare invents Jaques and 
Touchstone, critics so skilfully opposed, to supply it. 
But yet again, Jaques' cynicism being something of a 
pose, he must be mocked at by the Fool; while the Fool, 
being professionally a Fool, must be laughed at by Jaques, 
and, being betrayed to real folly by human weak- 
ness, laughed at by himself. Even Rosalind, being in 
love, must play with love. Even honest Orlando, being in 
love, must write ballads and pin them on oaks; but he 
writes them so very ill that we must allow him honest. 
Otherwise I should maintain his ancient servant Adam 



108 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

(wiiose part Shakespeare himself enacted) to be the one 
really serious figure on the stage. It is at any rate ob- 
servable that while, as we should expect, the play con- 
tains an extraordinary number of fanciful and more or 
less rhetorical moralisings — such as the Duke's praise of a 
country life, Jaques' often-quoted sermon on the wounded 
deer and his " All the world's a stage," Rosalind's lecture 
on the marks of a lover. Touchstone's on the virtue in an 
" If," on the Lie Circumstantial, and on horns (to name 
but a few) — it is Orlando who speaks out from the heart 
such poetry as: 

. . • whate'er you are 
That in this desert inaccessible, 
Under the shade of melancholy boughs, 
Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time; 
If ever you have look'd on better days. 
If ever been where bells have knoll'd to church, 
If ever sat at any good man's feast, 
If ever from your eyelids wip'd a tear 
And know what 'tis to pity and be pitied. 
Let gentleness my strong enforcement be . . . 

while to Adam it falls to utter the sincerest, most poign- 
ant line in the play: 

And unregarded age in corners thrown. 

An exquisite instance of Shakespeare's habitual stroke !— • 
with which the general idea, " unregarded age," is no 
sooner presented than (as it were) he stabs the concrete 
into it, drawing blood : " unregarded age in corners 
thrown/' 

But in truth all the rest of our bright characters are 
nowise in earnest. They do but play at life in Arden. As 



AS YOU LIKE IT 109 

Touchstone knew, " cat will after kind " ; and, as Shake- 
speare knew, the world is the world as man made it for 
man to live in. These courtiers are not real Robin Hoods. 
When the ducdame, ducdame has been played out, yet not 
so as to be over-wearied, Shakespeare gathers up his 
courtiers — as afterwards in The Tempest he gathers up the 
ISTeapolitan courtiers — and restores them, like so many fish, 
to their proper element; even as he himself, after living 
with shows and making himself a motley to the view, re- 
turned to his native Stratford, bought land, and lived 
doucely. The Duke regains his dukedom, his followers 
are restored to their estates. By a pretty turn of work- 
manship, Orlando, who started with a patrimony of " poor 
a thousand crowns," dependent on an unjust brother, 
returns as heir-apparent and that brother's prospective 
liege-lord. By an equally pretty turn of irony, the one 
man — the usurping Duke — who reaches Arden on his 
own impulse, moved by a ferocious idea to kill somebody, 
is the only one left there in the end, when the sentimental 
moralists have done with the Forest, to use it as a school of 
religious contemplation. 

Some critics have held it for a blot on the play that 
Oliver, his brotherly crime condoned, is allowed to marry 
Celia. Shakespeare merely neglects the excuse found 
for it in Lodge's story, where the repentant elder brother 
helps to rescue Aliena (Celia) from a band of robbers. 
It is unsatisfactory, if we will. The play, according to 
Swinburne, would be perfect " were it not for that one 
unlucky slip of the brush which has left so ugly a little 
smear in one comer of the canvas as the betrothal of 
Oliver to Celia." And George Sand, in her French adap- 



110 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

tation, like the bold woman she was, married Celia to 
— Jaques ! 

(6) 

But " perfect," after all, is a word we should keep 
in hand for perfection: and full though As You Like It 
is of life and gaiety and exquisite merriment, on other 
points than Oliver's betrothal (I have instanced the 
mechanical introduction, and the rather pointless chop- 
logic of the first Act), it does not quite reach perfection. 
And, after aU, a fantasy is a fantasy, and forgiveness 
Christian. I cannot feel my soul greatly perturbed over 
the mercy shown to Oliver; and I will give Celia to him, 
any day of the week, to save her from Jaques. The only ♦ 
possible wife for Jaques was one that Shakespeare omitted 
to provide. She should have to be an arrant shrew, to talk 
him dumb: and so he and Touchstone might have ex- 
piated their criticism together on a fair balance of punish- 
ment. Rosalind herself would have cured him; but 
Rosalind, of course, is by miles too good for Jaques. She 
is reserved to be loved by an honest man his life through ; 
and, like many another dear woman, to nag him his life 
through. 

Rosalind herself is not perfect ; but she is in a way the 
better for it, being adorable : at once honest and way- 
ward, " true brow and fair maid," and infinitely tantalis- 
ing. She means to be the 'Nut Brown Maid of the Green- 
wood, as the whole play seems trying, over and again, 
to be a Robin Hood play. She means this, I repeat ; but 
being courtly bred, she has to play with it before admit- 
ting it. Yet she is honest, and confesses her love almost 



AS YOU LIKE IT 111 

from the first, to herself and to Celia. She does not, as 
Imogen does, lift the heart out of us, ready to break for 
her: but she bewitches us, and hardly the less because all 
the while she allows us to know that the witchery is con- 
scious and intentional. 
ijf The play is — as you like it — a woodland play treated 
'courtly-wise, or a courtly play treated woodland- wise. It 
plainly derives, through Love's Labour's Lost, from John 
Lyly; whose polite comedies, highly artificial, but in one 
way or another a wonderful artistic advance, held the ear 
of Court and of City at the moment when Shakespeare set 
up as a playwright : and I hold that Mr. Warwick Bond, 
Lyly's learned and devoted editor, makes out unanswer- 
ably Shakespeare's debt to Lyly during his apprentice- 
ship in dramatic architecture. Mr. Bond says: 

That Shakespeare was his [Lyly's] disciple in this respect is 
beyond a doubt. ... To the fundamental brainwork which Lyly 
put into his plays, the greater poet and the Shakespearean stage in 
general are almost as much indebted as they are to his introduction 
of a lively, witty and coherent dialogue. 

Lyly's notion of a lively and witty dialogue, though be- 
gotten (I make no doubt) of an instinct for reform, re- 
sulted — like many another innovation — ^in a tyranny of its 
own making; and to my taste the dreariest passages in 
Shakespeare are those in which his ladies and courtiers 
exchange " wit." But it remains true that if we would 
understand Shakespeare's workmanship in the early com- 
edies, and trace how Love's Labour's Lost grew into 
As You Like It, we must study Lyly's Campaspe, his 
Endymion, and his Galatea. The main point to grasp is 
that As You Like It, however much improved by genius, 



112 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

belongs to the Lyly line of descent and to the order of the 
court-pastoral. 

The " pastoral " being granted, we may recognise ex- 
cellent workmanship in the Silvius and Phebe episode. 
To have garbed Rosalind as a boy without making a girl 
fall in love with him would have been to miss a plain 
opportunity — as plain a one as the sight of the bloody 
cloth at which Rosalind faints. It doubles the intrigue, 
and it provides with due irony one of the most charming 
chiming quartets in all Comedy: 

Phebe. Good shepherd, tell this youth what 'tis to love. 
Silvius. It is to be all made of sighs and tears; 

And so am I for Phebe. 
Phebe. And I for Ganymede. 
Orlando. And I for Rosalind. 
Rosalind. And I for no woman. 

and so on, and so on. The genre and the convention of it 
granted, nothing could be prettier than the inter-chime 
and the counter-chime. It is Lyly carried to the nth 
power. 

Having said this in praise of a piece of good work- 
manship, I must in fairness mention a piece of sheer 
botchwork. I mean the introduction of Hymen in the 
last Act. To explain away this botch as an imposition 
upon Shakespeare by another hand — to conjecture it as 
some hasty alternative to satisfy the public censor, who 
objected to Church rites of marriage on the stage— would 
be as easy as it were accordant with the nice distinctions 
of critical hypocrisy, were it not that Shakespeare, almost 
if not quite to the end of his days, was capable of similar 
ineptitudes, such as the vision of Posthumus and the 



AS YOU LIKE IT 113 

scroll dropped into his lap. You can explain away one 
such lapse by an accident ; but two scarcely, and three or 
four not at all. That kind of artistic improbability runs 
almost in harmonical progression. Hymen in As You 
Like It is worse than Hecate in Macbeth. 



CHAPTER VII 
THE STORY OF FALSTAFF 

An innovation — A permanent artistic principle in the treatment 
of history by fiction — An Aristotelian induction — A tetralogy and 
a pageant — Its unity of theme and treatment — The tradition of 
Chaucer — Falstaff and the Interludes — Meaning of Interlude — Fal- 
Btaff in The Merry Wives — Prince Hal and Henry the Fourth — 
Characters and their creators — David Copperfield — Johnson on Fal- 
staff — The dismissal of Falstaff — Why Shakespeare killed him — The 
scenes at the Boar's Head — The apotheosis of good-fellowship. 

(1) 

Any one, coining to the two parts of King Henry IV — 
which in fact make one — can see that here is something 
new. Though his acquaintance with other history-plays 
of the time be slight; even though it be confined to the 
other history-plays of Shakespeare, he cannot miss to 
perceive, in the mixture and blend of high political in- 
trigue, of royalties, proud nobles and rebellious wars, with 
footpads, tapsters, bawds and all the fun of the fair on 
Gad's Hill and in Eastcheap, an innovation upon the old 
method of chronicle drama. I am not pretending, of 
course, that the innovation has come at a stroke; that, as 
Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus, the invention sprang 
upon the world fully armed and complete out of Shake- 
speare's brain. Eor (1) as a matter of history, when 
a new and strong idea such as the Elizabethan drama, 
starts fermenting, all manner of men bring their grapes 
to the vat; (2) as a matter of history, the germ of the 
Gad's HiU frolic is to be found in an old play, The 

114 



THE STORY OF FALSTAFF 115 

Famous Victories of King Henry the Fifth, on whicli 
Shakespeare undoubtedly worked ; and (3) again, as a mat- 
ter of history, Prince Hal's youthful follies were a tradi- 
tion so fixed in men's minds that no play about him could 
dispense with them. 

But, after all this has been granted, when we note 
how Falstaff is no sooner introduced than he takes 
charge and establishes himself as the real hero of the play ; 
how he compels every one into his grand circumference; 
what a globe this earthy carnal man is, and how like a 
globe of earth he rolls; how, from his first merry en- 
counter with Henry to his last sorrowful one, he is and 
remains (as Hazlitt said) the better man of the two; 
why, then, as we go on to read Scott, Dumas, Thackeray 
or any great historical novelist, we cannot miss to ob- 
serve how powerful an innovation Shakespeare made of 
it. It has set up a permanent artistic principle in the 
treatment of history hy fiction; the principle that, in 
drama or novel of this kind, your best protagonists, and 
the minor characters you can best treat with liveliness as 
with philosophy, are not those concerning whose sayings 
and doings you are circumscribed by known fact and 
documentary evidence, but rather some invented men or 
women — -pawns in the game — upon whose actions and des- 
tinies you can make the great events play at will. Thus not 
only does Falstaff give Scott the trick of Dugald Dalgetty, 
Dumas the trick of The Three Musketeers, Charles Reade 
the trick of Denis the Burgundian; not only is Mistress 
Quickly the artistic mother of Madame Sans-Gene; but 
if we take almost any historical novel of the first class — 
Esmond, or UHomme Qui Bit, or The Cloister and the 



116 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Hearth, or The Chartreuse de Parme, or A Tale of Two 
Cities, or Tolstoy's War and Peace — we shall find the 
protagonists of the story to be figures evoked from the 
vaguest shadows of history, when they are not (as more 
often happens) pure figments of the author's brain. 

I touched upon this principle in my first paper, on 
Macbeth. It was Aristotle, of course, who first laid hold 
of the secret, when he asserted that " poetry is a more 
philosophical and a higher thing than history ; for poetry 
occupies itself in expressing the universal, history the par- 
ticular. The particular is, for example, what Alcibiades 
did or suffered." And this (let me say) was a very re- 
markable discovery for Aristotle to make by induction 
from the Greek dramatists, who concerned themselves 
mainly with the dooms of kings and royal houses — 

Sometime let gorgeous tragedy 
In seepter'd pall come sweeping by, 
Presenting Thebes' or Pelops' line. . . . 

But these, to be sure, were mythical, or, at most, le- 
gendary: allowing ^schylus or Sophocles to choose a 
great deal and to invent no little. So with Shakespeare — 
There had, once upon a time, been an actual Lear, an 
actual Cy:nbeline, and both were kings; an actual Ham- 
let, Prince of Denmark; an actual Macbeth, who made 
himself king. These, however, are legendary figures, 
evoked from the shadowy confines of Holinshed or Saxo 
Grammaticus; and Shakespeare calls them up almost in 
what shape he wills, to be reinspired with life and played : 
with as his genius may choose. Obviously he could not 
play thus with the houses of York and Lancaster, whose 



THE STORY OF FALSTAFP 117 

rivalries were not only documented but fresh in men's 
memories. Red, or white, or parti-coloured — if I may 
adapt Cowper — 

The rose was just washed, just washed by the shower, 
Which Henry to Edward conveyed — 

and Richard to another Henry, and a third Henry to an- 
other Edward, to Mary, and to Elizabeth. The blood and 
the tears that had washed it alternate red and white were 
too recent. The Elizabethan audience Tcnew these cham- 
pions of York and Lancaster — ^these cousins, making 
young men bleed for their sordid domestic quarrel. 

And Abner said to Joab, "Let the young men now arise and play 
before us." And Joab said, " Let them arise." Then there arose 
and went over by number twelve of the servants of Benjamin, which 
pertaineth to Ishbosheth the son of Saul, and twelve of the servants 
of David. 

And they caught every one his fellow by the head, and thrust his 
Bword into his fellow's side: so they fell down together, wherefore 
that place was called Helkathhazzurim (or the Field of Strong Men) 
unto this day. 

The many men so beautiful! ** 

And they all dead did lie . ., ., 

An Elizabethan audience, at any rate, knew all about 
Civil War, or their fathers had told them. Let the reader 
recall the two little vignettes that Shakespeare intro- 
duced into the Third Part of King Henry VI, " Enter 
a Son that hath Jcilled his Father, with the dead body," 
and its pendant, ^^ Enter a Father that hath hilled his 
Son, with the body in his arms." How poignant they 
are, for all their conventionality! I confess that to me 
the sad but yet selfish comment of Henry VI — 



118 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Sad-hearted men, much overgone with care. 
Here sits a king more woeful than you are, 

seems little if at all less hollow, as it holds far less sophis- 
try, than the famous but sentimental, selfish, sophistical 
meditations of Henry V after the honest soldier Williams 
has floored him in argument. But this is a matter of 
opinion: I will not press it. 

(2)' 

Coming back to our business, which is Shakespeare's 
workmanship, I ask the reader to peruse King Richard II, 
King Henry IV (both parts), and King Y, in succession, 
and note — 

(1) that, as a pageant, they follow in straight and 
almost undivided succession — as all the evidence of 
data goes to show they were composed in fairly rapid 
succession ; 

(2) that they carry the house of Lancaster from its 
usurpation to its highest point of prosperity ; 

(3) that the progress of this climb to the greatest 
fortune is dogged throughout by a sense of fate, an 
apprehension that what has been evilly won cannot 
endure, a tedium upon each success and an in- 
capacity for joy in it. " Vaulting Bolingbroke " I 
has no sooner won the crown than we see him a 
care-weary man, fearful of the future, haunted by 
the past. 

So shaken are we, so wan with care — 

That is the first line of the play: and at the back 
of his mind plays a notion to make it all right with 



THE STORY OF FALSTAFF 119 

God in some other way than by straight restitution. 
He will (when his enemies at home give him 
leisure) raise an English Crusade — 

To chase these pagans in those holy fields 
Over whose acres walk'd those blessed feet 
Which fourteen hundred years ago were nail'd 
For our advantage on the bitter Cross. 

But " now " will never come : for this service to Christ 
must wait till Henry's own kingdom is secure. He 
does not greatly care for himself: for himself royalty 
has lost savour as soon as tasted : but alas ! the heir-ap- 
parent is a madcap, and cannot be trusted to secure and 
enjoy the precious Dead-Sea fruit. This fear poisons 
him. At the opening of Part 2 we see him a broken man 
and a dying one. He dies unhappy. He has never known 
joy. Prince Henry, who has known joy, succeeds him, 
to renounce joy, to become an ingrate to those who taught 
him joy; to be a soldier and fight Agincourt, yet still to 
know that he in his turn is but fending off retribution — 

Not to-day, O Lord! 
O! not to-day, think not upon the fault 
My father made in compassing the crown. 

Yes, we must take the four plays as a tetralogy, not as 
separate pageants. So taken, they carry a single sense 
of doom; not insisted upon, as it is in the Oresteia, but 
scarcely the less haunting because intermittent, recurrent, 
a sense of a doom hesitant, delayed but for a while. 

Into this procession of doom, then — of stately, some- 
what wooden personages following high selfish ambitions 
— Shakespeare thrusts the jollity of common folk; real 



120 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

irresponsible wantoning of flesh and blood, and all as Eng- 
lish as Chaucer — for he who cannot read the racy tradi- 
tion of Chaucer into Ealstaff must be blind as a bat. 
"Now just how did that happen? 

(3) 

I have spent some time in presenting Falstaff as an 
innovation. Let us consider him for a while on the 
reverse side, as an archaism. 

If we turn to the end of King Henry lY, Part 2, we 
shall find there an Epilogue, " spoken by a Dancer." It 
closes thus: 

One word more, I beseech you. If you be not too much cloyed 
with fat meat, our humble author will continue the story, with Sir 
John in it, and make you merry with fair Katharine of France; 
where, for anything I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless 
already 'a be killed with your hard opinions: for Oldcastle died a 
martyr, and this is not the man. My tongue is weary: when my 
legs are too, I will bid you good night: and so kneel down before 
you; but, indeed, to pray for the Queen. 

ISTow I will wager the reader supposes me to be on the 
point of telling him how Sir John Oldcastle became con- 
verted into Sir John Ealstaff; which is what every one 
of our little text-books will laboriously explain, saving 
me the trouble. I am going to do nothing of the sort. I 
merely direct attention to those last very simple words — 

My tongue is weary; when my legs are too, I will bid you good 
night: and so kneel down before you; but indeed to pray for the 
Queen. 

Why do I lay stress on words so simple? Because, while 
the old miracle plays and moralities are sometimes ended 



THE STORY OF FALSTAFF 121 

with, a general prayer for the spiritual welfare of 
" sofereyns/' " lordings," and the rest of the audience/ 
this particular prayer for the reigning sovereign and some- 
times the estates of the realm is a particular characteris- 
tic, or stigma^ of a particular kind of play called Inter- 
lude. In dealing with the text of one of these Interludes 
we may often get the date of its first presentation from 
the prayer at the close. 

What, precisely, was an Interlude? Well, the Inter- 
lude passed through several phases. Moreover the out- 
lines of these phases were not distinct in their sequence, 
but interfused and blurred: so that at no given date can 
we say " the Interlude was just this " or " just 
fhat." Therefore I must be understood, in what fol- 
lows, to pretend no more than rough-and-ready accu- 
racy. 

The 'New English Dictionary defines " Interlude " as 
" a dramatic or mimic presentation, usually of a light or 
humorous character, such as was commonly introduced 
between the acts of the long mystery-plays or moralities, 
or exhibited as part of an elaborate entertainment." Sir 
Adolphus Ward gives a somewhat different account. The 
name, says he, " seems to have been applied to plays per- 
formed by professional actors from the time of Edward 
IV onwards. Its origin is doubtless to be found in the 
fact that such plays were occasionally performed in the 
intervals of banquets and entertainments." Mr. Cham- 
bers in his Mediaeval Stage gives reasons for holding 
neither one nor the other of these explanations to be 
satisfactory: and my own hypothesis (with the grounds 
* E. K. Chambers, The MedicEval Stage, Vol. ii, p. 189. 



122 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

of which I will not here interrupt my argument) is that 
" Interlude " meant, or came to mean, a play of a sort 
commonly presented indoors, in banqueting-halls, in the 
interval between the theatrical seasons — that is, during 
the winter; or, in other words, the sort of play to amuse 
a Christmas or Twelfth Night audience. 

Whichever of us be right matters very little in com- 
parison with these points, which can be established — 

(1) It was brief. 

(2) It aimed to amuse, and was traditionally comic. 
The Interludium de Clerico et Puella, for instance, 
is (as its name suggests) mere farce. 

(3) It started by borrowing abstract vices from the 
Moralities — vices such as gluttony, lechery, avarice; 
— and personifying them so as to exhibit their comic 
side. Now, to do this (it is a rule of art), you must 
turn the abstractions into real people. Here I quote 
Mr. Chambers again: — 

From the Moral the Interlude drew abstTactions; from the farce, 
social types. The possibility of vital drama lay in an advance to the 
'portraiture of individuals. 

(4) In the course of this progress the Interlude took 
a queer turn. Its patrons — the great nobles who 
invited it to amuse them in their banqueting-halls — 
were, as we all know, sharply and hotly divided over 
the Old and Reformed Religions. The actors took 
their cues. Soon, for its patrons' delectation after 
dinner, the Interlude became a farcical presentment 
of venal priests or of sour puritans, as this or that 
lordly midriff demanded to be tickled. We may fol- 



THE STORY OF FALSTAFF 123 

low this queer development in any history of the 
drama. Ajid now can we not see the point of Sir 
John Oldcastle, the Lollard, and how he came to he 
mixed up in this affair, and why Shakespeare, 
adapting the play for a mixed audience, had to 
change the name to Falstaff and apologise? 
(5) — and lastly — the Interlude ended by custom 
with a prayer for the reigning Sovereign; to send its 
audience away, no doubt, with the assurance that its 
loyalty was in the right place, and that, in spite of 
appearances, it had not gone too far. 
Now let us apply all this to King Henry IV, and we 
shall see, past all that has been so wonderfully changed 
in the process, back to the original device of it. I am 
occupied for the moment less with the fertility of Shake- 
speare's genius in execution than with the genius that 
originated the design, that devised the anatomy, of a new 
thing in art, by taking the stiff conventional bones of the 
old chronicle play and articulating them into the minor 
but equally conventional bones of the Interlude. I defer 
for the moment to consider how Shakespeare superin- 
duced the live flesh and infused the live blood. For the 
moment I am concerned only with the anatomy of the 
thing and how he made it flexible. 

(4) 

I must pursue this convention of the Interlude for a 
while, because it leads us on to another discovery. 

Every one knows the tradition that Shakespeare wrote 
The Merry Wives of Windsor because Queen Elizabeth 



1241 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

expressed a desire to see Ealstaff in love. Well, I believe 
in that tradition. It combines all one might expect of a 
royal command in general with all one might expect in 
particular of a command by a Virgin Queen. We know 
also that Shakespeare is reputed to have, obeying it, 
written The Merry Wives of Windsor in a fortnight. 
That again is easily credible. I have the author's word 
for it that one of the most brilliant plays of our time — 
The Admirable Crichton — was written in about that time. 
The evidence that Shakespeare was a rapid writer — an 
extremely rapid writer — cannot be contested. 

But I suggest that the real reason why we are troubled 
in reading The Merry Wives is that we cannot recognise 
Ealstaif as the same man. He has obvious similarities 
with the Falstaff of King Henry IV: but he is somehow 
not our Falstaff. For an instance (and it lies at the root), 
the Falstaff that we know was easy enough with Doll 
Tearsheet : he would simply not- have troubled to intrigue 
with Mistress Ford or with Mistress Page. He is too 
English, moreover, to be at home in an Italian comedy 
(and the plot of the Merry Wives is pure Italian). Again, 
though Bardolph, Pistol, ISTym wear their old names, they 
are not quite the same people; while Dame Quickly, but 
for tricks of resemblance in her chatter, is a different 
Dame Quickly altogether ; and Master Silence has become 
Master Slender without a word to tell us why. 

In Kifig Henry IV these characters had become so indi- 
vidual to us, such friends of ours, that we can scarcely 
understand what has happened. We shall understand, 
better by casting back and remembering that, to the play- 
wright; these figures — all of them — ^were, first of all, 



THE STORY OF FALSTAFF 125 

types; types of the old Interlude: the Clown, the Pan- 
taloon, Harlequin, Columbine; Pierrot, Pierrette, Punch, 
Judy; Falstaff (Gluttony) with a fat paunch; Bardolph 
(Drunkenness) with a red nose ; Mistress Quickly the con- 
ventional Hostess, Shallow the conventional Country Jus- 
tice, Slender — or Silence — the conventional awkward 
country booby — all types — " Here we are again ! " in fine. 
Shakespeare's mind is working; but the whole Eliza- 
bethan drama is in ferment too, yeasting up from type to 
individual; to lago from Richard III; to Shylock from 
Judas with a red beard ; from " the old Vice with his 
dagger of lath " to tragedy in which passion spins the 
plot and 

we are betrayed by what is false within.' 

(5) 

I return to King Henry lY, and to the question which 
ever recurs in these pages — " What was Shakespeare 
trying to do ? " 

Well, that for once has an answer staring us in the face. 
Prince Hal has to become King Harry; since (as Dr. 
Johnson puts it) " Shakespeare has apparently designed a 
regular connection of these dramatick histories from 
Richard the Second to Henry the Fifth." 

Prince Hal has to become King Harry: to start, as a 
matter of history, by being a scapegrace and be converted 
into the ideal warrior-king. 

We observe, then, how deftly from the beginning he is 
poised on the balance. In the one scale is Hotspur, chal- 
lenging him to honour with a provocation purposely made 



126 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

exorbitant: in the other, packed into Ealstaff, all that is 
sensual — this also exorbitant, the very bulk of the man 
helping our impression of the weight that would drag the 
Prince down. Each challenge is extreme. We have only 
to oppose Hotspur's high rant about honour with Eal- 
staff's low appraisement of it, and we have two cross- 
lights that illumine the whole play. Here are the two 
in sample. — 

Hotspur. By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap 

To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac'd moon, 

Or dive into the bottom of the deep 

Where fathom-line could never touch the ground, 

And pluck up drown&d honour by the locks, 

So he that doth redeem her thence might wear 

Without corrival all her dignities. 

Falstaff. "B.onouT I . . . Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an 
arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. 
Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. What ia 
honour? a word. What is that word "honour"? air. 
Who hath it? he that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel 
it? No. Doth he hear it? No. 'Tis insensible then? 
Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? 
No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore 
I'll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon: and so 
ends my catechism. 

Scarcely less obvious, as master-strokes, are the two 
great shocks by which Shakespeare works conversion on 
the Prince's character — (1) the call to arms for the 
Shrewsbury campaign, (2) the scene of the crown, with 
the reconciliation that follows, in the dying king's bed- 
chamber. 

These patent strokes have been applauded by critic 
after critic. It remains for one mainly intent upon 



THE STORY OF FALSTAFF 127 

workmanship to point out how the whole of the busi- 
ness is built on the old Morality structure, imported 
through the Interlude. Why, it might almost be labelled, 
after the style of a Morality title, Contentio inter Virtutem 
ei Vitium de anima Principis. 

(6) 

But " Falstaff ! " it will be said. " Could Shakespeare 
have fashioned and developed such an individual, total, 
full-bodied, full-blooded, teeming and gigantic man as 
this Falstaff out of a mere figure in an Interlude ? " 

I begin my answer with a request of the reader. Let 
him get out of his mind all the solemn discussions of all 
the commentators who never created a play or a novel or 
a scene or a character in their lives, and no more know 
how it happens than how a child comes to birth. No 
true artist develops or fashions a real character, once 
"brought to birth, any more than a mother thenceforth de- 
velops or fashions a child. It has a separate life ; it takes 
charge; the older it grows the more it takes charge. 
Which are we to suppose? — that, delivered of his partus 
masculus, Shakespeare took charge of Falstaff, or that 
Falstaff ran away with Shakespeare ? 

I think we may say of Falstaff and Shakespeare pre- 
cisely what Maurice Morgann (who published a Study of 
Falstaff in 1777)^ says of Shakespeare and us — 

Him we may profess rather to feel than to understand; and it is 
safer to say on many occasions that we are possest by him than that 
we possess him. 

* An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John FalstaflF : 
London. Printed for T. Davies, in Ruasel-street, Covent Garden: 
MDCCLXXVII. 



128 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Artists do not develop or fashion these characters to 
any extent of which those verbs are descriptive. It is not 
the process: it is not how the thing happens. Search- 
ing to convince of this, I hit on an illustration. Many 
women nowadays are daily parting with sons, brothers, 
lovers, husbands bound for the War. Shakespeare has to 
write down the words of many a woman at such a parting. 
Let us hear now what Volumnia says to Coriolanus : 

Thou hast never in thy life 
Show'd thy dear mother any courtesy: 
When she, poor hen, fond of no second brood. 
Hath cluck'd thee to the wars, and safely home 
Laden with honour. 

iNow let us listen to Lady Percy, clinging on Hotspur's 

strong hand: 

But if you go — 
Come, come, you paraquito, answer me 
Directly unto this question that I ask: — 
In faith, I'll break thy little finger, Harry, 
An if thou wilt not tell me all things true. 

And lastly let us hear how poor Doll Tearsheet puts it, 
perched on Falstaff's knee: 

Come, I'll be friends with thee, Jack: thou art going to the wars; 
and whether I shall ever see thee again or no, there is nobody cares. 

These three speeches will suffice; all so different, each 
so appropriate, and so poignant on the lips of the speaker. 
Surely we cannot conceive of Shakespeare, that rapid 
writer, as seated, with the end of a quill in his mouth, 
thinking out these differences! It simply does not hap- 
pen like that. Volumnia, Lady Percy, Doll Tearsheet, 
are all minor characters : but each in her turn has charge 
of Shakespeare : and as she dictates, he writes. 



THE STORY OF FALSTAFF 129 

If this seem an arbitrary pronoTincement, let us take 
evidence for it, and from, an artist of genius, Charles 
Dickens; just pausing to remind ourselves how the in- 
comparable Mr. Pickwick grew out of an engagement to 
provide " letterpress " for a series of comic Sporting 
prints. This is how Dickens commended another master- 
piece — David Copperfield — to the world: 

It would concern the reader little, perhaps, to know how sorrow- 
fully the pen is laid down at the end of a two-years' imaginative 
task; or how an Author feels as if he were dismissing some portion 
of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of all the creatures 
of his brain are going from him for ever. Yet I had nothing else to 
tell, unless indeed I were to confess (which might be of less moment 
still) that no one can ever believe this Narrative in the reading 
more than I believed it in the writing. 

That is how a great character in fiction — be he Pickwick 
or Don Quixote or my Uncle Toby or Falstaff — grows: 
grows as a plant, its creator tending it and watching, as 
it puts forth its own leaf, flower, fruit. If I may apply 
the words reverently, " that which thou sowest is bare 
grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain." 

m 

In this short study I shall not indulge in any panegyric 
j upon Falstaff: and I ask the reader to credit this to a 
Roman fortitude, since they say that all who write about 
Falstaff, loving him, write well. The performance I 
like best is Dr. Johnson's singular outburst beginning, 
" But Falstaff — unimitated, inimitable Falstaff — how 
1 shall I describe thee ? " — because it breaks from the heart 
of a moralist who, being human, could not help himself. 
Let us, to set beside it, recall that passage in Boswell 



130 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

which relates how his two rowdy young friends, Top- 
ham Beauclerk and Bennet Langton, knocked up the Doc- 
tor at dead of night : — 

One night when Beauclerk and Langton had supped at a tavern in 
London, and sat till about three in the morning, it came into their 
heads to go and knock up Johnson, and see if they could prevail on 
him to join them in a ramble. They rapped violently at the door 
of his chambers in the Temple, till at last he appeared in his shirt, 
with his little black wig on the top of his head, instead of a nightcap, 
and a poker in his hand, imagining probably that some ruffians were 
coming to attack him. When he discovered who they were, and waa 
told their errand, he smiled and with great good humour agreed to 
their proposal. " What, is it you, you dogs ? I'll have a frisk with 
you." He was soon drest and they sallied forth together into Covent 
Garden where the greengrocers and fruiterers were beginning to 
arrange their hampers, just come in from the country. Johnson 
made some attempts to help them: but the honest gardeners stared 
so at his figure and manner and odd interference that he soon saw 
that his services were not relished. They then repaired to one of 
the neighbouring taverns and made a bowl of that liquor called. 
Bishop, which Johnson had always liked; while in joyous contempt 
of sleep, from which he had been roused, he repeated the festive 
lines — 

Short, short then be thy reign 
And give us to the world again! 

They did not stay long, but walked down to the Thames, took a 
boat, and rowed to Billingsgate. Beauclerk and Johnson were so 
pleased with their amusement that they resolved to persevere in dis- 
sipation for the rest of the day: but Langton deserted them, being 
engaged to dine with some young ladies. Johnson scolded him for 
" leaving his social friends to go and sit with a set of wretched 
unidea'd girls." Garrick, being told of this ramble, said to him 
smartly, " I heard of your frolic t'other night. You'll be in The 
Chronicle." Upon which Johnson afterwards observed, " He durst 
not do such a thing. His wife would not let him." 

I think this passage explains why Johnson could not 
help loving FalstafF. They were both men of extravagant 
bulk, too, and both good Londoners. 



THE STORY OF FALSTAFF 131 

(8) 

The story of Falstaff can be extricated from the 
chronicle portion of the three plays and presented in a 
play by itself. In fact I have visited the Cambridge Uni- 
versity Library, and seeking out a volume of Miscellane- 
ous Plays marked Q, 28, 58, found it done (and not 
badly done, though sadly Bowdlerised) in 1822 by an 
author, unknown to me, who signs himself C. S. It will, 
at any rate, reward curiosity in a spare hour: but I do 
not want to see it on the stage ; because in proportion as 
Falstaff dominates all the scene and makes himself the 
hero, with no historical pageantry to divert us, the end 
of the story works out into pathos, with " Put not your 
trust in princes " for its moral. I grant the artistry of 
Scenes 4 and 5 of the last Act of King Henry IV, 
Part 2 . . . Enter Beadles, dragging in Mistress 
Quickly and Doll Tearsheet, this little scene ironically 
preparing us for the next, wherein Falstaff, who knows 
nothing of what has befallen the women, appears hot-foot 
from Gloucestershire, with Justice Shallow, just in time 
for the Coronation show as it returns from the Abbey : — 

Stand here by me, Master Robert Shallow: I will make the King 
do you grace; I will leer upon him as 'a come by; and do but mark 
the countenance that he will give me. 

iN"ow for the event: — 

Shouts within tmd the trumpets sound. Enter the 

King and his train, the Lord Chief Justice 

among them. 

Fal. God save thy grace, King Hal! my royal Hal! 

Pist, The heavens thee guard and keep, most royal imp of fame I 

Fal. God save thee, my sweet boy! 



132 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

King, {recognising him) My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that 

vain man. 
Ch. J. Have you your vpits? Know you what 'tis you speak? 
Fal. My King! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart! 
King. I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers. 

How ill white hairs become a fool and jester! 

I have long dream'd of such a kind of man, 

So surfeit-swell'd, so old, and so profane; 

But, being awake, I do despise my dream. 

— and so forth. I have not the stomach to follow the rest 
of that speech. White hairs may not become a fool and 
a jester, but no more does a growing beard excuse a cold 
prig. There is an obvious error in the stage directions 
which the Cambridge editors have omitted to correct. 
Henry V was not crowned at Westminster Abbey; the. 
ceremony took place at Exeter Hall. 

When the King has done, Falstaff turns to Master Shal- 
low with a wrung face. — 

Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound. 
And — the mischief of it — there cracks a great heart. 

(9) 
I have often tried to make excuses for this scene. To be 
sure, no excuses are needed: for a king must be a king, 
and no decent king can have a Ealstaff about him. 
'And yet . . . it is curious to observe that just at this 
time — almost, as accurately as one can fix it, when he 
handed Doll Tearsheet over to the beadles and dis- 
missed Falstaff to the Eleet, — Shakespeare was prepar- 
ing to leave London, buying property in Stratford, ap- 
plying for a coat-of-arms, and generally (as they say) 
turning respectable. It may be no more than a coin- 
cidence: I hope that it is. 



THE STORY OF FALSTAFF 133 

But anyhow I would see him relieved of the most 
damnable piece of workmanship to be found in any of his 
plays. I mean Prince Hal's soliloquy at the close of the 
very first Act of The First Part of King Henry IV: " I 
know you all/' says he, when Falstaff, Poins, and the rest 
have gone out — 

I know you all, and •will a while uphold 
The unyok'd humour of your idleness: 
Yet herein will I imitate the sun, 
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds 
To smother up his beauty from the world, 
That, when he please again to be himself. 
Being wanted, he may be more wonder'd at. 

This, if we accept it, poisons what follows, poisons the 
madcap Prince in our imagination for good and all. Most 
of us can forgive youth, hot blood, riot: but a prig of 
a rake, rioting on a calculated scale, confessing that he 
does it coldly, intellectually, and that he proposes to desert 
his comrades at the right moment to better his own 
repute — that kind of rake surely all honest men abhor. 

Yet the lines are pretty obviously written by Shake- 
speare. 

I should like to think — as I have brought myself to 
feel sure — that Shakespeare wrote the play without them, 
and with no idea of them: that, by-and-by Burbage (or 
whoever it was) came to him with a " Look here! We 
have later on, you know, to turn Prince Hal to respecta- 
bility: and the fool of an audience always want that sort 
of thing to be made a'Kh=ah to it from the first ": and 

I that so Shakespeare obediently tagged on those lines to 

this opening Act. 



134 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

(10) 

We cannot keep them and keep any opinion of Henry 
as a decent fellow. But even if we omit them, his con- 
duct is cruel enough; which brings me to my last con- 
sideration — " Why did Shakespeare kill Ealstaff ? " 

Well, he had to. He had made the King kill Falstaff's 
heart. The heart broken, the man dies, and there's an end. 

But let us wait a moment, and go a little deeper. Shake- 
speare killed Falstaff because he couldn't help it. He 
tells us of his death, but he could not bring him upon the 
stage in King Henry V, hecause he dared not 

How? Why? Because, as between two mortal men of 
this world, Henry was the wronger, Falstaff the wronged. 
Falstaff had never consciously hurt Henry, had never — 
so far from unkindness — thought of him but kindly. 
Wisely or not — wisely, if we will, — Henry had hurt Eal- 
staff to death : and not for any new default, sin or crime ; 
but for continuing to be, in fault and foible, the very same 
man in whose faults and foibles he had delighted as a 
friend. 

Then, if the object of the new play be — as all will 
admit — ^to present King Harry as our patriotic darling, 
henceforth Bates and Williams are good enough for him 
to practice his talk upon and he may rant about St. 
Crispin's Day until " the lowing herd winds slowly o'er 
the lea." But he must not he allowed to meet Falstajf. 
As he once very prettily said of Hotspur — 

Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere, 

and therefore he must not be allowed to meet Falstaff. 
For Falstaff can hill him with a looTc. \ 



THE STORY OF FALSTAFF 135 

(11) 

In their daily life, in business, in affairs of state, men 
constantly do wrong and are able as constantly to justify 
the wrong in their own eyes — nay, boldly to justify it 
before the world — ^with excuses. As I write this, I see 
the reader's mind fly off to such things as " scraps of 
paper," to the man who pleaded " necessity " for mur- 
dering Belgium — 

So spake the Fiend, and with necessity. 
The tyrant's plea, excused his devilish deeds. 

But I have known an Archbishop, from a University pul- 
pit, excuse a war with a weaker nation not because our 
cause was just (which, though quite arguable, he made 
no attempt to argue) , but because we were a greater, more 
enlightened, more progressive race than they, with a great 
literature, too — for in his fervour the preacher even 
dragged in literature — and therefore (argued he) God, 
who encourages and presides over the evolution of man- 
kind, must be on our side ! At the time I thought this a 
blasphemous argument, and that if a true word of the 
Gospel had dropped from Heaven like a bomb, interrupt- 
ing it, there would not, as Thoreau once said, have been 
left one stone of that meeting-house upon another. 

For of course you cannot righteously kill or maim a 
man or swindle him, on the ground you are godlier than 
he, or cleanlier, or better. The whole point rests on the 
justice of the particular quarrel. " Are you, or is he, 
in the right ? " Even if you be in the right, there still 
remain the questions of patience, charity, elementary for- 
giveness. " Do these not rest on you as a duty towards 



136 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

your neighbour, by your very claim to be better than 
he?" 

Poetry — which I suspect therefore, as well as for other 
reasons, to be divine — will have nothing to do with such 
ointments of conscience. In Poetry, if one man wrong 
another, that other becomes ipso facto the better man. 
It was Henry (plead what excuses of State you will) who 
wronged Falstaff and killed his heart: Palstaff had never 
a thought of hurting Henry: and therefore, or ever you 
can present Harry of Agincourt as your heau ideal of a 
warrior king, you must kill Palstaff somehow and get hia 
poor old body behind the arras: for, as Hazlitt said, he 
is the better man of the two. 

(12) 

I have left myself no space for the customary panegyric 
on Palstaff. I am sorrier that I have left myself no space 
to show how wonderfully in these Eastcheap scenes Shake- 
speare, to give an old Interlude life, sought back, recap- | 
tured the very spirit of Chaucer, and improved it. In all 
the great sweep of the plays there is nothing so racy, so ; 
English. 

But, for a last word: — Ealstaff — with all his imper- 
fections on his head and all his offences rank — has, and 
has to the nih. degree, what we mean when we call So- 
and-so " a good fellow." He may have led Prince Hal 
astray. But Shakespeare invented him some two hundred 
years later ; since when for three hundred years he has been 
doing nothing but good to man, woman, or child. His laugh 
at its grossest is salutary, refreshing; and, as for us, we 
laugh with him or at him, but we usually do both together. 






CHAPTER VIII 
HAMLET 



A factitious mystery — A masterpiece, not a problem — ^The evidence 
of its perennial popularity — Every ' star ' his own Hamlet — Highest 
art never vmintelligible — Some imperfect diagnoses of Hamlet — A 
masterly opening — Superbness of diction — A flaw of construction. 

(1) 

So much has been written upon Hamlet, that one 
can hardly descry the play through the rolling cloud of 
witness. The critical guns detonate with such uproar, 
and, exploding, diffuse such quantities of gas, as to im- 
pose on us that moral stupor which I understand to be 
one of the calculated effects of heavy artillery in warfare. 
The poor infantryman — if I may press the similitude — 
discerns not in the din that half of these missiles are fly- 
ing in one direction, half in another, still less how large 
a proportion of both hit no mark at all. He can scarcely 
command nerve for a steady look at the thing itself. This 
loud authority confuses us all. It starts us thinking of 
Hamlet not as an acted play but as a mystery, a psy- 
I chological study, an effort of genius so grandiose, vast, 
vague, amorphous, nebulous, that men of admitted genius 
— even such men as Coleridge and Goethe, — tracking it, 
have lost their way in the profound obscure. 

137 



138 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

(2) 

N'ow, with all the courage of humility, I say that this 
is, nine-tenths of it, rubbish. 

I insist that we take Shakespeare first, and before any 
of these imposing fellows. At all events he wrote the 
play, and they did not. 

Moreover, he wrote it as a play — to be acted on a stage, 
before an audience. 

Moreover, he wrote it, not for an audience of Goethes 
and Coleridges, but for an audience of ordinary men and 
women. 

And yet further, if pressed, I am ready to maintain 
that any work of art which is shapeless, nebulous; any 
work of art which misses its artistic purpose to be the 
prey of pedants and philosophers, is to that extent a bad 
piece of art. And I hope to demonstrate that Hamlet is 
no such thing, but a masterpiece. 

All this may seem brazenly bold: but having gone so 
far I will go yet one more step further and say that while, 
to understand Hamlet, the best way is to see it acted on 
a stage, a second-best way is to read it by ourselves, sur- 
rendering ourselves to it as a new thing, as childishly as 
any one pleases. As Emerson wrote, " All that Shake- 
speare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in 
a corner feels to be true of himself." In this chapter I 
shall ask the reader to take Hamlet by itself, as a new 
thing. Let us renew our courage from a sentence of 
Bacon's : " Regnum, Scientice ut regnum Coeli non nisi svh 
persona infantis intratur — Into the Kingdom of Knowl- 
edge, as into the Kingdom of Heaven, whoso would enter 
must become as a little child." 



HAMLET 139 

(3) 
The earliest printed copy of Hamlet, known to us, was 
discovered in 1823 — a little, horribly cropped quarto 
bearing date 1603, and entitled: 

The I Tragicall Historic of Hamlet | Prince of Denmark | By 
William Shake-speare. | As it hath beene diverse times acted by 
his Highnesse ser | vants in the Cittie of London: as also in the 
two U I niversities of Cambridge and Oxford, and elsewhere | At 
London printed for N.L, and John Trundell | 1603. 

It was a drama, then; written by a real playwright, 
whose name was Shakespeare: and not by Hegel nor by 
Werder. " As it hath beene diverse times acted by his 
Highnesse servants in the Cittie of London: as also in 
the two Universities of Cambridge and Oxford "... 
It would seem from that to have been a popular play. 
Can we suppose that it would have been a popular play 
had it been a mystery, a problem, or anything like the 
psychological enigma that Coleridge and Goethe and their 
followers have chosen to make of it ? Let us ask ourselves 
as men — ^Does that sort of thing happen ? 

But I will tell what does happen. To this day a travel- 
ling company of actors, thrown on their beam-ends for 
lack of money, having acted this or that to empty houses, 
always as a last resort advertise Hamlet. It can be 
counted upon, above any other play, to fill the treasury. 
Again, when an actor takes a benefit, what is the piece 
most commonly chosen ? — Hamlet. Why ? " Because," 
it may be answered, " Hamlet himself is notoriously a 
* star ' part, with plenty of soliloquies, with plenty of 
what I believe is called ' fat ' in the Profession ; and 
moreover because the part has become consecrated some- 



140 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

how, invested by tradition with a certain aura of great- 
ness and crowned as with a halo." I applaud the answer: 
it is an excellent one so far as it goes. But why does the 
gentleman who enacts the First Gravedigger also choose 
Hamlet for his " benefit night " ? ]N'ow that question 
happens to be more searching than for the moment it 
may seem. I was once assisting at a dress rehearsal of 
Hamlet, when the First Gravedigger came off the stage 
in a passion. In the green-room it exploded. " Why," 
he wished to know, " should I be treated like a dog by 
that conceited fool ? " — meaning our Hamlet, of course. 
" His temper gets viler at every rehearsal. Surely, after 
airing his vanity through four Acts, he might be quiet 
while I have my little say ! " " Bless you, sir," answered 
an old dresser, " it's always like that. In these forty 
years, I've helped dress (I dare say) all that number 
of Hamlets: and Hamlet and the First Gravedigger 
always fall out. It's a regular thing. I've known 
'em come to blows." The old man allowed that he could 
not account for it at all. Hamlet, he said, was a great 
play — a wonderful play — and there it just was. " Hamlet 
and First Gravedigger : when you've said that, you've said 
oil and vinegar." Well, while engaged in denying that 
Hamlet is a mystery in the sense in which Coleridge, 
Goethe, and the rest would make it a mystery, I fairly 
admit there are mysteries about it. But why the First 
Gravedigger should choose for liis benefit night the great 
and wonderful drama which gives his hated rival such 
opportunity for display, is neither beyond conjecture 
nor even a puzzling question. It fills the cash-box. 
Let me illustrate my argument from another side, 



HAMLET 141 

using another tradition of the theatre. We all know that 
to play Hamlet, and play him successfully, is the crown 
of every young actor's ambition. But here comes in an- 
other mystery — which yet is no mystery at all, unless the 
critics have fogged us. When he comes to it, he always 
'plays it successfully. An actor, about to play Hamlet 
for the first time, once assured me (and from boyhood he 
had known the theatre, as we say, " from the inside ") — 
" If I make a mess of this, I shall be either a complete 
fool or too good to live; and I am neither." Well, he 
did not make a mess of it, and so I escaped choosing 
between those dismal alternatives. But when reading the 
play I have often pondered his words, and it is not in 
any love of paradox that I suggest this question. — 

It is the fashion, and was the fashion before we were 
born, so that we may call it the custom — it is the custom 
to talk of So-and-so's Hamlet: of Garrick's Hamlet, 
Kemble's Hamlet, Kean's Hamlet; Macready's, Salvini's, 
Booth's, Phelps', Irving's Hamlets; Tree's Hamlet, 
Forbes-Kobertson's Hamlet. This custom of speech, if 
it mean anything, would seem to imply that each of 
these gifted interpreters has given the world a different 
interpretation of that mystery; and that each has made 
an individual success of it: which, when we come to 
think of it, approaches the miraculous, if not the 
absurd. By various paths they all arrive at the core of 
the great secret: and yet there would seem to be some 
mystery about a mystery which turns out to be a different 
one every time it is explained. 



142 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

(^) 

E'ow I suggest that all these fine fellows in their turn 

have made a success in Hamlet simply because it was 
there all the time: ready-made by a man who had been 
beforehand with them, and, having a capital interest in 
the play, had unconsciously taken care that their self-con- 
scious displays should never attain to spoiling it. I sug- 
gest that all those critics, too (Coleridge, Goethe, Klein, 
Werder, and the rest) , have been plucking different hearts 
out of the mystery and exhibiting them, simply because 
there was never any mystery in Hamlet, and consequently 
no secret heart to pluck out. 

I know that this is a bold thing to say. But I say it 
and shall support it (1) with a monumental principle of 
all great art and (2) with an ordinary piece of evidence, 
as common as our daily Times and Morning Post. 

(1) For the principle. — It is never a test of the high- 
est art that it is unintelligible. It is rather the last 
triumph of a masterpiece — the triumph definitely 
passing it for a classic — that all men in their degree 
can understand and enjoy it. Of course they will 
understand and enjoy it in varying degrees according 
to their intelligence and sensibility. But all the 
great masterpieces we rank in the first class have 
this essential note — a noble and naked simplicity. 
The Odyssey, the Venus of Milo, a passage of Virgil, 
or of Dante, or of Milton, Botticelli's Prima Vera, 
Velasquez' Surrender of Breda, Othello, The Tem- 
pest, a lyric of Hugo's, Lincoln's peroration on the 
dead of Gettysburg, a preface of Plato's or a parable 
of Christ's — all these hold you with a wonder at what 



HAMLET 143 

they show, not of what they may perchance hide. To 
be sure, we come to them again and again, to dis- 
cover fresh beauties. But our delight is to have our 
eyes unsealed; to feel ourselves alive in a world 
where this thing has been shown us. It's your 
stained-glass window critics that great art has no 
use for. 

Do we, knowing Shakespeare, suppose that he 
wrote the longest of his plays to hide what he meant ? 
If so, on every ground of presupposition, " the less 
Shakespeare he " ! 
(2) For my piece of ordinary evidence — I have al- 
ready given it. Hamlet is the most popular of his 
plays. The man we pass in the street eagerly pays 
his money to see it. Can we suppose that he pays 
to see something he cannot understand? Is that the 
way of men who make up an audience? 

I, for my part, believe that he goes to it because 
it is an amazingly fine play. 

(5) 

In a later chapter I propose to examine some theories 
about Hamlet put forward by men whose names compel 
one to treat whatever they may preach with respect. But 
it is permissible here, as it is convenient, to enter a plea 
that, although I may prove foolish in attempting to 
analyse it as a simple, straightforward piece of workman- 
ship, at any rate I have been precedently matched — if 
not overmatched — in folly by the extreme mystifiers. A 
certain Mr. Edward P. Vinting, in the Mystery of 
Hamlet (Philadelphia, 1881), has demonstrated that the 



U4i SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Prince of Denmark was a woman in disguise, and in 
love with Horatio! — another injustice to Ophelia! A 
previous American researcher had found the key in the 
line " He's fat and scant of breath." ^ A German 
critic, Loening (as quoted by Tolman), thinks that the 
evidence points to an internal fatness, fatness of the 
heart; and he believes that this physical infirmity helps 
to explain the inactivity of the hero! 

(6) ' 

Let us dismiss these and far more respectable theories 
from our minds for a while, and suppose that we are 
seated in a theatre, expectant but knowing no more of 
what is to come than the play-bill promises: that his 
Highness's Servants are to enact The Tragical History 
of Hamlet^ Prince of Denmarh, written by William 
Shakespeare, an author in whom we have some con- 
fidence. I know that this is to ask a great deal: since, 
as Hazlitt says, " we have been so used to this tragedy 
that we hardly know how to criticise it any more than 
we should know how to describe our own faces " — and 
Hazlitt had the luck to be a good-looking man. I know 
that this is to risk a good deal. The reader will pardon- 
ably think to himself, recalling the sentence I quoted 
just now, that in practice the effort to become as children 
is apt to result in being merely childish. Well, let us 
take that risk! 

It shall suffice me here to lay the scene and indicate 
some of the characters as they are first presented to us: 

1 Popular Science Monthly, May, 1860 — article entitled The Im- 
pediment of Adipose — a Celebrated Case ('case' being Hamlet). 



HAMLET 



145 



figures of men and women that we see with our eyes and 
hear talking: but men and women of whose business in 
life up to this point we know nothing, as we must listen 
to learn what thoughts and emotions are at work within 
them, as we must watch to discover how, in the space of 
three hours or so, they will work out their dooms. 

The scene opens upon the battlements before the Castle 
of Elsinore. It is night — ^midnight — and freezing hard; 
the air still as it is cold. The stars are out. Under them, 
on the terrace — the wash of the waves just audible far 
below — a single sentry keeps guard. To him enters the 
relief guard, but so noiselessly, whether because of the 
snow on the platform or by his own stealth along it, that 
it is this newcomer who anticipates the challenge. 



Bernardo. 

Francisco. 

Bern. 

Fran. 

Bern. 

Fran. 

Bern. 

Fran. 

Bern. 
Fran. 
Bern. 



Fran. 



Who's there? 

Nay, answer me: stand and unfold yourself. 

Long live the King! 

Bernardo ? 

He. 

You come most carefully upon your hour. 

'Tis now struck twelve : get thee to bed, Francisco. 

For this relief much thanks: 'tis bitter cold. 

And I am sick at heart. 

Have you had quiet guard? 
Not a mouse stirring. 

Well, good night . . . 
{then as Francisco begins to move off) 
If you do meet Horatio and Marcellus, 
The rivals of my watch, bid them make haste. 
(halting and listening) 

I think I hear them. {In the act of changing guard, 
having stepped a little forward, he challenges) 
Stand, ho! Who is there? 



146 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

!N"ow here already, in fifteen broken lines (or eleven, as 
we choose to count), we have conveyed to us — ^the hushed 
voices helping — the place, the freezing cold, the night, 
the very hour of the night, and withal a kind of creeping 
expectancy. We are on the watch : the mere figure of the 
sentinel — stiff, in his armour, under the stars — means 
that. But we are on the watch against something un- 
usual, something fearful. This is not the usual relief 
of guard: the inverted challenge proves it. And the 
men know something. 

Bern. Have you had quiet guard? 

Fran. Not a mouse stirring. 

What is it they know, or suspect? Why is Bernardo, 
eager and prompt on time, at once so anxious that Horatio 
and Marcellus shall not be late ? Doubtless we shall know 
in a moment . . . 

But already we, seated in the audience — ^we, fairly 
familiar with William Shakespeare as a playwright — 
know, if we can think of it above this wonderful arrest 
of our attention, that he is bringing off his opening scene 
magnificently. He is sometimes a little careless with 
these openings. We are not old enough to have wit- 
nessed the opening — ^but for this, unparalleled — of The 
Tempest. That is a marvel to come. But the quarrel 
which started Romeo and Juliet was brisk and went with 
a swing : as the first Scene of King Henry IV, Part 1, and 
the first Scene of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, both 
courtly and noble, led us exquisitely up to the plunge, with 
Scenes 2, into Mistress Quickly's tavern, Peter Quince's 
back shop. The Merchant of Venice — not bad : Henry V, 



HAMLET 147 

if we allow prologues, good enough: The Merry Wives, 
admirable chatter: The Taming of the Shrew, original 
and first-class — original, that is, to us, who don't happen 
to have read the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. But 
As You Like It, as poor as could be ..." As I re- 
member, Adam, it was in this fashion bequeathed me by 
will, etc." — somebody telling somebody else, for the audi- 
ence's instruction, something which somebody else had 
known perfectly well for years. In Macbeth, to be sure, 
the other day, he scarified us with those three hags on a 
desert heath — 

When shall we three meet again — 
In thunder, lightning, or in rain? 

But this promises to be still better. What is the dread 
something that makes these men — soldiers, too — talk so 
hoarsely, breathe so tensely, their breath a vapour on 
the night air? 

Stand, ho! Who is there? 
(Enter Horatio and Marcellus) 
Hor. Friends to this ground. 

Mar. And liegemen to the Dane. 

Fran. Give you good night. 
Mar. O . . . farewell, honest soldier! 

(peering) Who hath relieved you? 
From, {indicating Bernardo, who has taken up post in the shadow) 

Bernardo hath my place. 
Give you good night. (Exit) 
Mar. Holla! Bernardo? 

Bern. Say, 

WTiat, is Horatio there? 
Hor. (Shivering, feeling himself for cold) 

A piece of him. 
Mar. What, has this — thing — appear'd again to-night? 
Bern. I have seen nothing. 



148 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Mar. Horatio says 'tis but our phantasy, 

And will not let belief take hold of him 

Touching this dreaded sight, twice seen of us: 

Therefore I have entreated him along 

With us to watch the minutes of this night, 

That if again this apparition come, 

He may approve our eyes and speak to it. 

Hor. Tush, tush, 'twill not appear. 

We begin to keep our eyes for this Horatio, this sane, 
sceptical man : for in truth we, who by report know some- 
thing less about it than he, turn with a certain trust to 
one who refuses to take seriously that which we are com- 
ing gradually to dread: that which, in less than thirty 
lines, has been successively insinuated into our fears 
as " this thing," " this dreaded sight," " this appari- 
tion " . . . 

Says Bernardo, 

Sit down awhile; 

And let us once again assail your ears, 

That are so fortified against our story. 

What we have two nights seen. 
Eor. Well, sit we dowB, 

And let us hear Bernardo speak of this. 
Bern. Last night of all. 

When yond same star that's westward from the pole 

Had made his course to illume that part of heaven 

Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself. 

The bell then beating one, — 

(The Ghost enters) 
Mar. Peace! . . . break thee off! 

Look where it comes again ! 

There is our opening, and it closes on that imforget- 
able note of the half line — 

The bell then beating one — 



: I 



HAMLET 149 

closes and reopens upon this apparition which, awfully 
lambent out of darkness, chokes Bernardo's tale and in 
the same moment tells it out, answering the expectancy 
up to which — though the play is as yet but 40 lines old, — 
we have been gradually strung since midnight was. 

The bell then beating one, — 

Now we know why Bernardo, relieving guard at twelve, 
would have word carried to the others to make haste. It 
— the thing — is a ghost crossing the terrace, tall, pale, 
majestical, with frosty glints on its eyes, beard, armour: 
as Bernardo whispers, quavering back. 

In the same figure as the King — ^that's dead. 

The two soldiers, as the apparition stalks by, turn to 
Horatio and beg him to question it. Their dependence 
helps our steadily-growing respect for him as he pulls his 
wits together and challenges. This sceptical fellow has 
courage. But the Ghost passes on. It will have none 
of his challenge. 

iN'ow let us mark how the men take it. — 

Mar. Is it not like the King? 

Eor. (musing) As thou art to thyself: 

Such was the very armour he had on 

^Tien he the ambitious Norway combated; 

So frown'd he once, when, i»- an angry parle. 

He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice. 

'Tis strange . . . 
Mar. {The inferior man, still eager — as inferior men always are — 
to constate the unimportant evidence) 

Thus twice before, and jump at this dead hour. 

With martial stalk hath he gone by our watch. . . . 



150 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

I shall hereafter spare to worry the reader with details : 
but here at the beginning will ask him to note the superb 
diction already closing us in its grip .. ,. ,.; 

He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice 

— ^the ice — ^that picture at once recalled by the silvery; 
glitter shed about the spectre . . . 

Thus twice before, and jump at this dead hour. 

Tour second-rate man would have written " prompt," or 
" right/' or " pat," or " lo ! at this dead hour," even if 
he had the wit to make the hour dead. But " jump at 
this dead hour" — Whose stroke was that ever but a 
Shakespeare's ? 

The rest of the Scene, even the Ghost's return, I find 
inferior. There is too much about Fortinbras, of whom 
we are thus led to expect that he will have great effect 
upon what is to follow. Actually he has next to none, 
though the dramatist seems to start by intending that he 
should. Moreover some thirty lines are wasted on the 
old protasis trick I mentioned just now: Horatio, with 
an eye on the audience, informing Marcellus of what 
Marcellus must be supposed to know beforehand. 

(8) 

But in Scene 2 we come to the real protasis, and to a 
great feat of artistry which (although we are not for the 
moment supposed to know it) Shakespeare was to bring 
to perfection in The Tempest: the feat, after curtain 



HAMLET 151 

raised upon an astounding shock, of making his second 
Scene quietly and naturally explain it, unravelling a knot 
so that all the threads reach out separately, intelligibly, 
ready for the predestined new ravel. 

If we except Ophelia, all the main characters are 
gathered in the state-room: King Claudius, the Queen, 
Hamlet himself, Polonius, Laertes, Horatio, Marcellus. 
Bernardo enters before the Scene is done. 

The King acquaints us with the main situation in a 
speech which, as a public one, addressed to full court, 
is not recapitulatory beyond reason. Recital of things 
known to everybody is generally allowed in a public 
speech, — else where should many of us be ? The situation, 
as explained by King Claudius, comes to this: — 

The late King, his brother, is dead (how, it is not sug- 
gested), and his memory yet green. But there is no use 
crying over spilt milk; it is bad for the commonwealth; 
and meanwhile, and moreover, he, Claudius, has some- 
what hastily married his brother's widow. As he prefers 
to put it — 

Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature 
That we with wisest sorrow think on him 
Together with remembrance of ourselves. 
Therefore our sometime sister, now our Queen, 
The imperial jointress to this warlike state. 
Have we, as 'twere with a defeated joy — 
With an auspicious and a dropping eye, 
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage, 
In equal scale weighing delight and dole, — 
Taken to wife. 

[What he does not explain, by the way — and what the 
commentators conspire with him and with Shakespeare to 



162 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

overlook — is the small difficulty that, Hamlet's father de- 
ceased, Hamlet should ipso facto have inherited the 
throne. From the commentators, discreetly silent over 
this hitch in workmanship, I turn to Charles Lamb, who, 
of course, noted it, but slides it over; telling us in his 
tale of the play merely that Claudius took the crown " to 
the exclusion of young Hamlet, the son of the buried king 
and lawful successor to the throne." But this will not 
quite do. Hamlet is not " young Hamlet " : for in the 
graveyard scene his age is accurately made out to be thirty. 
Unless some strange law of succession be hinted at in the 
line describing Hamlet's mother as 

The imperial jointress of this warlike state, 

there is a flaw of construction here.] 

But, Shakespeare overlooking this trifle, Hamlet does 
not seem to mind or indeed to think about it first or last. 
We turn our eyes to him. He — a man of thirty, or near- 
ing thirty — a student, but a paragon of youth when he 
has ever asserted himself — is not thinking of himself, or 
of title and royalty. He is occupied with something very 
much more human and essential — ^the awful haste with 
which his mother has married again, with her husband's 
brother, too. He loves his mother: but he has adored 
his father ; and how his mother can have so quickly shifted 
from such a man to this Claudius . . .0, most hor- 
rible, tills lust in a woman, and that woman his own 
mother! He idolises his father's memory, and amid the 
factitious rejoicings wears black, in a court he loathes. 
He craves leave to be dismissed from it, to go back to 
his old University, Wittenberg. This being denied him, 



HAMLET 153 

(he consents, but when the Court has withdrawn, he breaks 
out — 

That it should come to this! 
But two months dead! Nay, not so much, not two: 
So excellent a king; that was, to this, 
Hyperion to a satyr: so loving to my mother. 
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven 
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth! 
Must I remember? why, she would hang on him. 
As if increase of appetite had grown 
By what it fed on: and yet, within a month — 
Let me not think on't — Frailty, thy name is woman! — 
A little month, or ere those shoes were old 
With which she follow'd ray poor father's body. 
Like Niobe, all tears: — why she, even she, — 
O God! a beast that wants discourse of reason 
Would have mourn'd longer, — married with my uncle. 
My father's brother, but no more like my father 
Than I to Hercules: within a month; 
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears 
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes. 
She married. 

Now let us mark that at this point Hamlet suspects 
not at all any foul play in the manner of his father's tak- 
ing-off. But the very scurf of what he knows is so 
loathsome that he cannot help suspecting a putridity 
deeper still. 

On the acute moment of this suspicion comes Horatio — 
the sound, sane, sceptical friend Horatio — to report (two 
solid soldiers, Bernardo and Marcellus, confirming) the 
vision seen haunting the Castle platform. " I knew 
your father," says the grave man, Horatio. " These hands 
are not more like." 

Ham. 'Tis very strange. 

Hor. As I do live, my honour'd lord, 'tis true. 

And we did think it writ down in our duty 

To let you know of it. 



154 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Ham. Indeed, indeed, sirs, but this troubles me. 
Hold you the watch to-night? 

Mar. \ We do, my lord. 

Ber. \ 

Ham. Arm'd, say you? 

Mar.) Arm'd, my lord. 

Ber. \ 

Ham. From top to toe? 

^^^- i My lord, from head to foot. 

Ber. I ^ 

Ham. Then saw you not his face? ' 

Hor. O, yes, my lord; he wore his beaver up. 

Ham. What, look'd he frowningly? 

Hor. A countenance more in sorrow than in anger. 

Ham. Pale, or red? 

Hor. Nay, very pale. 

Ham. And fix'd his eyes upon you? 

Hor. Most constantly. 

Sam. I would I had been there. 

Hor. It would have much amaz'd you. 

Ham. Very like, very like. Stay'd it long? 

Hor. While one with moderate haste might tell a hundred. 

^"'"'i Longer, longer. 

Ber. S 

Hor. Not when I saw 't. 

Ham. His beard was grizzled? no? 

Hor. It was, as I have seen it in his life, 
A sable silver'd. 

Ham. I ^^^^ watch to-night; 

Perchance 'twill walk again. 

Hor. I warrant it will. 

Ham. If it assume my noble father's person, 

I'll speak to it, though hell itself should gape 
And bid me hold my peace. I pray you all. 
If you have hitherto conceal'd this sight, 
Let it be tenable in your silence still, 
And whatsoever else shall hap to-night, 
Give it an understanding, but no tongue: 
I will requite your loves. So fare you well: 
Upon the platform, 'twixt eleven and twelve, 
I'll visit you. 

All. Our duty to your honour. 



HAMLET 165 

Ham. Your loves, as mine to you: farewell. 

[Exeunt all but Hamlet. 
My father's spirit in arms! all is not well; 
I doubt some foul play: would the night were come! 
Till then sit still, my soul: foul deeds will rise. 
Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes. 

So we leave him on the verge of discovery. 



CHAPTER IX 
HAMLET 

' II 

Polonius and Laertes — A family failing — ^The loneliness of Ophe- 
lia — The cause of Hamlet's horror — The two keys to Hamlet's 
soul — Criticism divorced from knowledge of life — Beatrice Cenci — 
Hamlet's " madness " and hesitancy — The Queen's insight into Ham- 
let — Shakespeare's passing misogyny — Hamlet's aflFected madness be- 
fore fools — His moral scrupulousness — A self-explanatory soliloquy. 

(1) 
In Scene 3 we improve our small acquaintance with 
Laertes, who has leave to return to France after the 
coronation and is now on the eve of sailing. In bidding 
farewell to his sister Ophelia, to whom Prince Hamlet 
has made certain protestations of love, he takes occasion 
to give her a quantity of advice touching the regulation 
of her conduct. We soon begin to suspect this senten- 
tious young man of being a fairly accomplished prig, and, 
when he has done, applaud the gentle irony and the spirit 
in his sister's retort. 

I shall the effect of this good lesson keep 

As watchman to my heart. But, good my brother. 

Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, 

Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven. 

Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine. 

Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads 

And recks not his own rede. 

" 0, fear me not ! " Laertes assures her complacently. But 
he is to get back a deal more than this of what he has been 

156 



HAMLET 167 

giving: for at this moment his father Polonius enters, 
and after chiding him for his delay in getting aboard, 
proceeds to delay him yet further and unconscionably, 
treating him to a homily on the Whole Duty of a Young 
Man; and ending, when Laertes craves leave to be gone, 
with a glance at the clock, and 

The time invites you: go, your servants *tend. 

We perceive that Laertes takes after his father, that the 
males of this family are addicted to longwindedness ; and 
surmise that Lady Polonius (as I must call her) has died 
of it, some while since. From the first we have a sense 
of a most pathetic orphaned loneliness about Ophelia. 
Throughout, she has no one to turn to, no woman to give 
her advice. (For let us note that, unlike many another 
heroine of Shakespeare's, she is not even allowed a wait- 
ing-maid. Save the Queen, there is no other woman in 
the play-bill. And what kind of help or advice could such 
a woman as the Queen give?) On the other hand, of male 
admonition — of advice which is precisely the kind of ad- 
vice she does not want — the poor child gets enough and 
to spare. Her brother is no sooner gone than her father 
turns on her and reads her another lecture — reams 
of worldly counsel, all withered, conventional. Poor 
Ophelia ! 

There is enough of wither'd everywhere 

To make her bower, and enough of gloom; 

There is enough of sadness to invite, 

If only for the rose that died, whose doom 

Is Beauty's . . . 

There is enough of sorrowing, and quite 

Enough of bitter fruits the earth doth bear. 



158 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

If this Scene vex us a little, halting our impatience and 
procrastinating on the edge of Hamlet's terrible enlight- 
enment, let us do justice to that check and suspense as a 
piece of artistry. 

If Laertes and Polonius seem (and are) tedious as 
well as conventional, may we not recognise that Shake- 
speare deliberately made them so ? In this Court of Den- 
mark an abyss of horror has been half-opened to us. 
Earth has parted, and for a moment given up its dead; 
has shut again, not yet surrendering the secret. But 
enough has been revealed to seize our minds, and Ham- 
let's mind, with suspicion deep as hell. On the stage, 
which is for the moment a crust thinly closed over damna- 
tion, these two courtiers, father and son, prate saws on 
the proper conduct of life, meaningless as they are wise; 
batter them on the brain of a helpless girl whose heart, 
we divine (though as yet we know not how it will come 
to pass), has fatally engaged her in the tragedy of which, 
as she has set no spring in motion, her will can control 
no spring. She, a helpless victim, is being prated to her 
doom by brother and father, the only two in the world 
she might naturally have counted on for help. 

It is too pitiful : and at the same time, if our impatience 
allow leisure for it, the subtlest of comedy : high comedy, 
upon the very edge of all that is most tragic. Let us, 
when the play is over, revert our minds to this scene which 
at the time we thought dull. 

(2) 
Of the fourth Scene, wherein Hamlet awaits his 
father's spirit upon the terrace: and of the famous fifth 



HAMLET 169 

Scene, wherein he encounters it alone and the horrible 
secret is revealed to him, I shall say very little. They 
speak for themselves. They conclude the first Act. 

But, since so many of the commentators seem to make 
wholly insufficient allowance for it, I must recur to the 
extreme horror of the shock inflicted on Hamlet. I have 
already tried to show that he had positively adored his 
father and still adores his father's memory. His words, 
as Dr. Bradley quite justly says, " melt into music when- 
ever he speaks of him." 

I have tried to illustrate, by the passage beginning 
" That it should come to this ..." with what a vio- 
lence of loathing his soul is affected — even before he sus- 
pects murder — by his mother's foul haste in mating so 
swiftly with her husband's brother; by the scent of lust 
in it, nay of incest; for again and again (though this is 
often overlooked) Hamlet and the Ghost insist upon it as 
incestuous. That thought is preying on Hamlet's mind 
before he ever hears of the Ghost. 

It may be shown further, by many quotations, that he 
is a man naturally well-conditioned; which means, apt 
and eager to accept folk at their best, and to see good 
rather than evil in them.^ I shall not labour this, for 
this again Dr. Bradley has sufficiently shown, and quite 
incontrovertibly. 

Now let us hear and attend the effect of the full 
disclosure. — 

Ohost. List, list, list! 

If thou didst ever thy dear father love — 

* Let the reader note — for it is highly significant — how often the 
word " noble " occurs in this play. 



160 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Hamlet. God! 

Ghost. Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder. 

Hamlet. Murder! 

Ohost. Murder most foul, as in the best it is; 

But this most foul, strange, and unnatural. 

Hamlet. Haste me to know't, that I, with wings as swift 
As meditation or the thoughts of love, 
May sweep to my revenge. 

Ghost. I find thee apt; 

And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed 
That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf, 
Wouldst thou not stir in this. Now, Hamlet, hear: 
'Tis given out that, sleeping in mine orchard, 
A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark 
Is by a forgfed process of my death 
Rankly abus'd; but know, thou noble youth, 
The serpent that did sting thy father's life 
Now wears his crown. 

Hamlet. O my prophetic soul! 

My uncle! 

Ghost. Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast. 

With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts, — 
wicked wit and gifts, that have the power 
So to seduce! — won to his shameful lust 
The will of my most seeming-virtuous Queen. 

Hamlet! what a falling-off was there; 
From me, whose love was of that dignity 
That it went hand in hand even with the vow 

1 made to her in marriage; and to decline 
Upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor 
To those of mine! 

But virtue, as it never will be mov'd, 

Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven, 

So lust, though to a radiant angel link'd. 

Will sate itself in a celestial bed. 

And prey on garbage. 

But soft! methinks I scent the morning air, 

Brief let me be. Sleeping within mine orchard. 

My custom always in the afternoon. 

Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole. 

With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial. 

And in the porches of mine ears did pour 

The leperous distilment. . . . 



HAMLET 161 

Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother's hand, 
Of life, of crown, of queen, at once despatch'd; 
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, 
Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd. 
No reckoning made, but sent to my account 
With all my imperfections on my head: 
O, horrible! 0, horrible! most horrible! 
If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not; 
Let not the royal bed of Denmark be 
A couch for luxury and damnfed incest. 
But, howsoever thou pursuest this act. 
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive 
Against thy mother aught; leave her to heaven. 
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge. 
To prick and sting her. Fare thee well at once. 
The glow-worm shows the matin to be near, 
And 'gins to pale his imeffectual fire; 
Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me. 
Hamlet. all you host of heaven! O earth! what else? 

And shall I couple hell? O fie! hold, hold, my heart I 

And you, my sinews, grow not instant old, 

But bear me stiflBy up! Remember thee! 

Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat 

In this distracted globe. Remember thee! 

Yea, from the table of my memory 

I'll wipe away all trivial fond records. 

All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past. 

That youth and observation copied there; 

And thy commandment all alone shall live 

Within the book and volume of my brain, 

Unmtx'd with baser matter: yes, by heaven! 

O most pernicious woman! 

O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! 

My tables, — meet it is I set it down, 

That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain; 

At least, I'm sure it may be so in Denmark. 

|1 I have quoted the passage almost at length because it 

I' is the key of the action, as the famous soliloquy is the 

! key to the inaction of the drama: and without both keys 

we cannot unlock the awful perturbation of Hamlet'3 



162 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

soul. Reading the commentators one would think that to 
discover your father had heen murdered and your mother 
to be an incestuous adulteress was all in the day's work. 
So they fall to discovering it to be strange, nay even a 
little absurd, that a man after such a shock should call 
for his tablets. Can they not see that under such a shock 
a decent man must dread that his mind is going ? " Re- 
member thee ! . . . Remember thee ! " " Remember " 
is the word tolling above all the chaos in his brain ; and as 
a drowning man at a straw he snatches the tablets. Men 
in such extremity always snatch on some concrete, some 
trivial thing. Why will not these scholars start with a 
little practice in learning about men and women? Has 
none of them heard, perchance, of sailors who, when their 
ship was going down and the last hope had perished, have 
slipped quietly below and started — to shave? What are 
these commentators made of — ^what crisis have they ever 
dared in their lives — if they do not know, if they cannot 
even surmise, that when this solid world seems breaking 
under the feet of any sound man in health and strength, 
it is always some such small solid trifle that he grips? — 
Ay, and woman, too! Let us recall Beatrice Cenci, as 
she goes to her death. 

Give yourself no unnecessary pain, 

My dear Lord Cardinal. Here, Mother, tie 

My girdle for me, and bind up this hair 

In any simple knot: ay, that does well. 

And yours, I see, is coming down. How often 

Have we done this for one another; now 

We shall not do it any more. My Lord, 

We are quite ready. 

So it is with that letting down of hysteria in whicK 
Hamlet, hearing the voice of the ghost underfoot as he 



HAMLET 163 

swears Horatio and Marcelliis to secrecy, the two touch- 
ing the cross of his sword-hilt, breaks into wild scoffing — 
all the while facing it out before them. — 

Ghost ( beneath ) . Swear. 

Hamlet. Aha, boy! say'st thou ao? art thou there, truepenny? 

Come on: you hear this fellow in the cellarage; 

Consent to swear. 

The critics who object to this are the very critics, of 
course, who cannot abide that knocking on the gate in 
Macbeth and that vulgar porter. 

(8) 

But we will suppose the first Act ended. In the in- 
terval those of the audience not entirely occupied with 
nuts and oranges fall to chattering and chatting, their 
hubbub breaking forth sudden as one's own sob of the 
breath now that the long tension is for a while relaxed. 
An intelligent stranger seated next to me on my right 
breaks the ice by remarking that the first Act has gone 
very well. " Very well indeed," I answer. " And in- 
deed," says he, "the old play of Hamlet's Revenge, 
though it has amused me once or twice, was never a patch 
on this." " I have heard of it, of course," say I ; " but, 
as it happens, I never saw the thing." " And now you 
never will," he promises me, " for this will drive it clean 
off the boards. Yet the story itself is the same, so far, 
and comes (I believe) straight out of an old chronicle. 
In the next Act we shall see how this Hamlet feigns mad- 
ness, the better to execute his revenge." 

Well, sure enough, in Act ii this business is developed. 
'And here, with the reader's leave, I shall deal com- 



164 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

pendiously with much talk about Hamlet's " madness," 
closing with, as I hope shortly to have done with, that 
dwindling band of critics who would persuade us that 
Hamlet is actually " mad." 

What is " madness " ? Surely we have only to think 
for a moment to know that up to a point it is a purely 
relative term, like " drunkenness." When is a man 
" drunk " ? On the one hand we have the fanatic tee- 
totaller who cannot speak of a glass of claret save as 
" alcohol " or " intoxicating liquor " ; and so he darkens 
counsel. At the other end of the critical scale we have 
the indignant witness upon oath : " What ? Bill drunk ? 
Why, I seen him close, as the Police was carryin' him 
past on the stretcher, and he distinctly opened an eye 
and looked at me ! " 

So again with " mental deficiency " — another relative 
term. I remember once, as Chairman of an Elementary 
Schools Committee, having to attempt, under orders from 
the Board of Education, a census of the mentally defec- 
tive children in a certain County area. That area was 
divided, for executive purposes, into eight districts, and 
we set their several clerks to work. Their reports ranged 
from 3^ in one fortunate district to 15^ in its all-but- 
next-door neighbour: these extremes, of course, yielding 
us no more than the not immediately useful information 
that two men can employ widely different standards upon 
a relative term. 

And so with madness — Very . few of us are without 
some little kink of the brain, some tendency to estimate 
this or that out of its due proportion in what the most 



HAMLET 165 

of us allow to be God's ordered universe. Still fewer 
of us perhaps — fewer indeed of strong passions and af- 
fections — shall never on our way through this transitory 
life be thrown off our balance by distress of mind or the 
shock of calamity. We have seen Hamlet, a man of 
strong affections, reeling under the most terribly ac- 
cumulated shock. !Now Shakespeare, of course — it is 
the dramatist's first function — invites each of us to put 
himself in Hamlet's place. The point of every tragedy 
is its demand on our several assent — " There, but for the 
grace of God, go I " — A or B or C or D — down at any 
rate to Q. Cannot any one of us, imagining such a 
shock to fall upon him as fell upon Hamlet, conceive it 
as rocking his mind in violent oscillation on its pivot? 

Then may we not go on to own that the evidence of this 
oscillation at least partly explains the apparent hesitancy 
of Hamlet's purpose? But he is never thrown off the 
pivot — never; though his own mind, now and again, may 
doubt it. 

Here I would call attention to two points : — 

(1) It is as certain as can be that an exhibition of 
real madness would not evoke in the breasts of an 
Elizabethan audience the compassionate pity it 
evokes from ours, or anything like it. Our rude 
forefathers treated lunacy as a subject for brutal 
mirth, and behaved to it much as the boys who pelt 
a village idiot. Let us read our Twelfth Night, and 
ponder what happened to Malvolio. 

(2) It is now provided by English Law that no one, 
j whatever the doctors may say, shall be declared a 
I lunatip and removed to a madhouse unless the neces- 



166 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

sity for it be certified by a magistrate, who must 
personally examine the patient. 'Now if you, my 
reader, were a magistrate and Polonius, no doubt 
you would give that certificate without a qualm, and 
Hamlet would be shut up — ^while you would remain 
Polonius. 

The Queen (who, after all, is his mother) guesses, as 
a mother will, more swiftly and accurately than any one 
else, what is amiss with Hamlet. When, after idle re- 
ports from the other courtiers, Polonius comes with Ms 
explanation — fatuously wrong, I need not say — and the 
King is comforted by it — 

He tells me, my dear Gertrude, he hath found 
The head and source of all your son's distemper — 

she pierces to the root of it in a flash. — 

I doubt it is no other but the main; 

His father's death and our o'erhasty marriage. 

She never deems him mad, save for that moment in her 
room, when he sees the ghost which she does not see.* 
Then, observing him (as she puts it) to bend his eye on 
vacancy and with the incorporal air to hold discourse, for 

^ Let me here interpose a word on the Ghost. Up to this scene 
between Hamlet and his mother he has been the most positive ghost 
in all Shakespeare. He is not like Macbeth's floating spectral dagger, 
which Macbeth sees but we do not: he differs from Banquo's ghost, 
which Macbeth sees, and we see, but the guests about the tables do 
not. Up to this scene the ghost of Hamlet's father, though he will 
speak to none but Hamlet, is visible to every one his path crosses. In 
this Scene alone he is visible to one person alone, Hamlet, and not 
to another, the Queen. 



HAMLET 167 

one moment she surmises excusably that the tale has been 
truer than she has deemed it, and Hamlet cries — 

Why, look you there! look, how it steals away I 

My father, in his habit as he lived! 

Look, where he goes, even now, out at the portal! 

[Exit Ghost. 
Queen. This is the very coinage of your brain: 
This bodiless creation ecstasy 
Is very cunning in. 

Hamlet turns on her. — 

Ecstasy! 
My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time, 
And makes as healthful music. It is not madness 
That I have utter'd. Bring me to the test 
And I the matter will re-word, which madness 
Would gambol from. Mother, for love of grace. 
Lay not that flattering unction to your soul. 
That not your trespass but my madness speaks. 

Yet, though Hamlet seems to her to be staring at 
vacancy, addressing vacancy, — in spite of this, though it 
follows on the swift careless stroke which kills old 
Polonius, hiding behind the arras — his mother knows that 
he is not mad, and his accusing words tear through her, 
not as any ravings of lunacy, but as the direct impeach- 
ment of moral right, stripping bare her crime. I shall 
return upon this; but I wish here to establish the point 
that his mother, the first to divine, here and throughout 
thoroughly understands. 

Yet, let us mark, she thoroughly understands at the 
point where Hamlet is nearest to insanity, if by insanity 
we mean that a man is " possessed," ridden by an idea 
which throws the rest of life into disproportion. If you 
press this, Hamlet was beside himself — ridden by furious 



168 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

disgust of the lechery that can inhabit woman. ISTor can 
I, reading and comparing the plays he wrote about this 
time, deny that Shakespeare himself (whatever his story) 
was possessed, tormented, maddened by some revelation 
of the lust possible in woman. This man, who has joy- 
fully created Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola — this man who is 
to create Imogen, Perdita, Miranda — this man for the 
nonce is a mad dog, biting upon all that is vilest in sex — 
let a hundred filthy comparisons in Troilus, Othello, Lear 
be witness — and constantly and hideously referring this 
lust back to the most sacred name of " mother." Says 
Troilus, shuddering, to Ulysses. — 

Think! we had mothers! 
Ulysses. What hath she done, Prince, that can soil our mothers? 
Troilus. Nothing at all, unless that this were she. 

I dwell on this because it is the central explication of 
Hamlet's behaviour towards Ophelia. I cannot excuse 
that behaviour, and my explication here will need some 
enforcement which I hope to give by-and-by. For the 
present I content myself with this. — 

Hamlet loves Ophelia. But the discovery of his 
mother's lust drives him — and it is as nigh as he ever 
gets to positive madness — into a loathing perversion of 
mind against all women and especially towards this single 
maid of his choice. Even as in the recoil from Cressida's 
perfidy Troilus swings round upon the holiest memory 
of woman — " Think ! we had mothers ! " — so, in the re- 
coil from a mother's lust, Hamlet swings round, rends 
the veil down from that other altar of love, scatters the 
sacred fire, stamps black the live coal. 



HAMLET 169 

We note in Act ii, Scene 1, it is Ophelia who first 
brings word of Hamlet's derangement; and we note how 
her old dotard of a father jumps at each piece of evi- 
dence, accepting with fresh glee whatever confirms his 
wrong conclusion, until he can hold his delighted folly no 
longer. 

Come, go with me : I will go seek the King. 
This is the very ecstasy of love! . . . 

We note, moreover, that in dealing with all such com- 
placent fools — not only Polonius, but Rosencrantz and 
Guildenstern — Hamlet deliberately and with relish enacts 
the madman. We watch him tucking his arm under 
Polonius's and drawing him aside: — 

Polonius {entering with Ms message). My lord, the queen would 

speak with you, and presently. 
Hamlet. Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel? 
Pol. By the mass, and 'tis like a camel indeed. 
Ham. Methinks 'tis like a weasel. 
Pol. It is backed like a weasel. 
Ham. Or like a whale? 
Pol. Very like a whale. 
Ham. {dropping his arm suddenly). Then I will come to my 

mother by and by. They fool me to the top of my bent. 

I will come by and by. 

We mark the absurd discomposing questions with which 
Hamlet staggers Eosencrantz and Guildenstern in the 
midst of their fashionable chatter about the players. — 

Ros. Faith, there was much to do on both sides. . . . There was 
for a while no money bid for argument unless the poet and 
the player went to cuffs in the question. 

Ham. Is it possible? 

Oml. O, there has been much throwing about of brains. 

Ham. Do the boys carry it away? 



170 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

But he never talks like that to the sane man, Horatio. 
Horatio knows: Gertrude, his mother, knows too. For 
a moment in the great scene closing the third Act, she 
is shaken: but that is only because he stares at a Ghost 
which she cannot see. His awful arraignment — surely 
the most awful ever spoken by son to mother — has turned 
her eyes into her very soul. She bows her head on her 
beautiful arms, the arms that have nursed him. — 

O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain! 
Hamlet. O throw away the worser part of it. 

And live the purer with the other half. . . . 

1^0 : Hamlet is sane. Considering the shock he has under- 
gone, we may almost say there was never man saner. 

The commentators want to know why Hamlet, having 
discovered his uncle's guilt, did not make an end of him 
at once. It appears that this is what they would have 
done . . . So, you see, one never knows. One meets 
them going to the University Sermon or shuffling along 
upon some other blameless errand, and — can we believe 
it? — any one of these Harry Hotspurs will have killed 
his some six or seven dozen Scots at a breakfast, washed 
his hands, and said to his wife, " Fie upon this quiet life! 
I want work." O yes ; and that is the sort of men they 
indeed are, if only you believe what they write just now 
to the newspapers! 

But, about this pusillanimous Hamlet, what answer 
can we give them ? I think we can give them half-a-dozen, 
and any one good enough. 



HAMLET 171 

Shall we answer (and truly I think it should suffice 
for them) that had Hamlet been like them and slain his 
uncle at the beginning of Act ii, there would have been 
no more play, or at any rate the rest of the tragedy would 
have been transferred to the box-office ? 

Or shall we tell them that, as we see him, Hamlet is a 
man of gentle, scrupulous nature, and of an exceedingly 
active intellect? 'Now all the positive evidence Hamlet 
has, when all is said and done, is the word of a Ghost: 
and if, as in a famous trial Mr. Justice Stareleigh in- 
formed the court, " what the soldier said is not evidence," 
still less is the word of a Ghost. Men in this world do not 
post off to stab other men on the affidavit of a Ghost. 

The worst of taking such a common-sense view as this 
is that you always find some German Professor waiting 
to expound your common-sense with a pestle until he 
has brayed it down to a solemn theory, and you are 
tempted to curse the day on which you ever ventured the 
observation that two and two make four. Professor Wer- 
der, of Berlin, in this solemn way proves that, being un- 
able to call the Ghost into a witness-box, Hamlet has to 
deal circuitously, or the Court of Denmark will interpret 
his revenge as based upon insufficient evidence. But the 
Court of Denmark has nothing to do with it. Hamlet's 
responsibility rests with his own conscience. As Sir 
Walter Ealeigh says — ) 

A curiously business-like vein of criticism runs through essays 
and remarks on Hamlet. There is much talk of failure and success. 
"A ghost has told him to avenge the murder of his father; why 
does he not do his obvious duty, and do it at once, so that everything 
may be put in order ? " His delay, it has sometimes been replied, is 
justified by his desire to do his duty in a more effective and work- 



172 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

manlike fashion. The melancholy Prince has certainly not been able 
to infect all who read his story with his own habit of thought. 

If the government of the State of Denmark were one of the issues 
of the play, there would be a better foothold for these practical 
moralists. But the State of Denmark is not regarded at all, except 
as a topical and picturesque setting for the main interest. The 
tragedy is a tragedy of private life, made conspicuous by the royal 
station of the chief actors in it. 

I repeat, Hamlet's responsibility is to his own conscience. 
That is why (being a grown and thoughtful man) he 
cannot strike in the way these commentators demand. He 
is scrupulous. That is why (as he tells us) he designs 
the play-scene, to entrap the king's conscience and get 
better proof. That is why (as he tells us) he cannot kill 
Claudius pat, while he is praying. And let us note how 
Shakespeare prepares us for his leniency as we listen to 
Claudius' agony — 

O bosom black as death! 
O limed soul, that struggling to be free 
Art more engag'd! 

ISTay, Hamlet himself at times is moved by a doubt of 
the Ghost, if it be authentic or no — 

The spirit that I have seen 
May be the devil ; and the devil hath power 
To assume a pleasing shape ; yea, and perhaps 
Out of my weakness and my melancholy, 
As he is very potent with such spirits. 
Abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds 
More relative than this. The play's the thing 
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King. 

(5) 
And yet, and after all, and although, if we reckon up 
the time covered by the action of the play, we find it but 



HAMLET 173 

a month or two, Hamlet does reproach himself with his 
irresolution, and the Ghost does reappear to remind him 
of its impatience. Yes : and why should a man like Ham- 
let, noble of nature, gentle, thoughtful, scrupulous, eager 
to believe the best of his fellows — why should such a man 
not shrink from the deed and cast about for new incen- 
tives? The charge, let us remind ourselves, is imposed 
upon him. He has done nothing to invite it. In itself 
he loathes it. — 

The time is out of joint. cursfid spite 
That ever I was born to set it right. 

'At first he finds the thought of it so intolerable that he 
meditates suicide. I contend that the famous soliloquy 
and the scene with Ophelia that immediately follows have 
only to be given straightforwardly on the stage, or read 
with intelligence in the study, and they explain them- 
selves. 

Hwm. To be, or not to be: that is the question: 
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suflFer 
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, 
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, 
And by opposing end them. To die: to sleep; 
No more; and by a sleep to say we end 
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks 
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation 
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; 
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; 
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come. 
When we have shuflBed off this mortal coil. 
Must give us pause: there's the respect 
That makes calamity of so long life; 
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time. 
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely. 
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay, 



174 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

The insolence of office, and the spurns 

That patient merit of the unworthy takes. 

When he himself might his quietus make 

With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear 

To grunt and sweat under a weary life 

But that the dread of something after death, 

The undiscover'd country from whose bourn 

No traveller returns, puzzles the will, 

And makes us rather bear those ills we have 

Than fly to others that we know not of? 

Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all. 

And thus the native hue of resolution 

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. 

And enterprises of great pitch and moment 

With this regard their currents turn awry 

And lose the name of action. Soft you now! 

The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons 

Be all my sins remember'd. 

OpJi. Good my lard. 

How does your honour for this many a day? 

Ham. I humbly thank you: well, well, well. 

Oph. My lord, I have remembrances of yours. 
That I have longed long to re-deliver; 
I pray you, now receive them. 

Ham. No, not I; 

I never gave you aught. 

Oph. My honour'd lord, you know right well you did; 

And with them words of so sweet breath compos'd 
As made the things more rich: their perfume lost. 
Take these again; for to the noble mind 
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. 
There, my lord. 

Ham. Ha, ha! are you honest? 

Oph. My lord? 

Ham,. Are you fair? 

Oph. What means your lordship? 

Ham. That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should ad- 
mit no discourse to your beauty. 

Oph. Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with. 
honesty? 

Ham. Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner transform 
honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty 
can translate beauty into his likeness: this waa sometime 



I 



HAMLET 175 

a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love 
you once. 

Oph. Indeed, my lord, you made me believfe so. 

Ham. You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot so 
inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it: I loved 
you not. 

Oph. I was the more deceived. 

Ham. Get thee to a nunnery : why wouldst thou be a breeder 
of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could 
accuse me of such things that it were better my mother 
had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; 
with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to 
put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to 
act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling 
between heaven and earth? We are arrant knaves all; 
believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. ..." 

Oph. 0, help him, you sweet heavens! 

Ham. If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for thy 
dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou 
shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, go: 
farewell. Or, if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool; 
for wise men know well enough what monsters you 
make of them ... I have heard of your paintings, too, 
well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make 
yourselves another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and 
nickname God's creatures and make your wantonness your 
ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath made me 
mad. I say, we will have no more marriages. Those that 
are married already — all but one — shall live: the rest shall 
keep as they are. To a nunnery, go! 

[Exit. 

Oph. O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown! 

The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword: 

The expectancy and rose of the fair state, 

The glass of fashion and the mould of form, 

The observ'd of all observers, quite, quite down! 

And I, of ladies most deject and wretched. 

That suck'd the honey of his music vows. 

Now see that noble and most sovereign reason. 

Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh; 

That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth 

Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me! 

To have seen what I have seen, see what I seel 



176 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

And after that — ^let us mark the anguish of the irony — 
it is Ophelia that is to know real madness and die of it: 
as — let us mark the master-stroke — in her babblings this 
clean maid, of a mind unhinged, pours forth the pretty 
sad simple bawdry of 

To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day. 

Who save Shakespeare could ever have wrung our ears 
with thatl 



CHAPTEK X 

HAMLET 

III 

The simple secret of the critics — Coleridge and another — " It is we 
who are Hamlet," the key is in every man's breast^ — An old play 
furbished and refurbished — How this explains Ophelia in Hamlet's 
brutality — Blank verse as a vehicle for drama — Dryden's examination 
examined — Milton and the caesura — Dryden's own practice versus hia 
theory — How blank verse helps the actor. 

(1) 

I HAD intended to conclude these notes on Hamlet witli 
a discussion of the principal commentators and their theo- 
ries, and to be as dull as the subject demanded. But 
in the process of wading through so much of their out- 
pouring as fills 300 pages of the second volume of the 
late Mr. Furness's Variorum Edition of the play I made, 
or seemed to make, a discovery warning me not to pursue 
an inquest foredoomed to be idle. 

Indeed, the discovery had lain under my hand since, in 
the first few pages of this book, when dealing with 
\Macheth, 1 had insisted that the mrst necessary aim of 
la tragic poet, of a dramatist, was to make his hero 
sympathetic (o/ioio? is Aristotle's term, and Aristotle is 
I strenuous on this point) : to present him as a man, how- 
ever much higher in rank aud station than we, however 
I circumstantially exalted, still recognisable as of like pas- 
Isions with ourselves: so that, as the drama goes on, we 
\ 177 



178 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

enter completely into his feelings, hang upon what is hap- 
pening to him, hold our breath with a sense that all this 
is happening to us. The reader will certainly remember 
this; for I have recurred to it more than once or twice, 
using for its formula Baxter's well-known saying, " There, 
but for the grace of God, go I." Without it, of course, 
we cannot understand Macbeth or Lady Macbeth, Othello 
or Desdemona. 

(2) 

Now let us listen to this from Coleridge — perhaps the 
finest critical genius that ever employed itself on Shake- 
speare : — 

Hamlet's character is the prevalence of the abstracting and gen- 
eralising habit over the practical. He does not want courage, skill, 
will, or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking; and it is 
curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who 
all the play seems reason itself, should be impelled at last by mere 
accident to effect his object. 

He [Shakespeare] intended to portray a person in whose view 
the external world, and all its incidents and objects, were compar- 
atively dim, and of no interest in themselves, and which began to 
interest only when they were reflected in the mirror of his mind. 
. . . The poet places him in the most stimulating circumstances 
that a human being can be placed in. He is the heir-ap- 
parent of a throne; his father dies suspiciously; his mother ex- 
cludes her son from his throne by marrying his uncle. This is not 
enough: but the ghost of the murdered father is introduced to 
assure the son that he was put to death by his own brother. What 
is the effect upon the son? — instant action and pursuit of revenge? \ 
No; endless reasoning and hesitating — constant urging and solici- 
tation of the mind to act, and as constant an escape from action; 
ceaseless reproaches of himself for sloth and negligence, while the 
whole energy of his resolution evaporates in these reproaches. . . . 

He is full of purpose, but void of that quality of mind which 
accomplishes purpose. Anything finer than this conception and 
working out of a great character is merely impossible. Shakespeare 



HAMLET 179 

wishes to impress on us the truth that action is the chief end 
of existence — that no faculties of intellect, however brilliant, can 
be considered valuable, or indeed otherwise than as misfortunes, if 
they withdraw us from, or render us repugnant to, action, and lead 
us to think and think of doing, until the time has elapsed when we 
can do anything effectually. In enforcing this moral truth Shake- 
speare has shown the fulness and force of his powers: all that is 
amiable and excellent in nature is combined in Hamlet, with the 
exception of one quality. He is a man living in meditation, called 
upon by every motive human and divine, but the great object of his 
life is defeated by continually resolving to do, yet doing nothing but 
resolve. 

1 Now, with all respect to the memory of Coleridge, I 
call this fluffy writing. I have combed out whole para- 
graphs of fluff, but fluff is still the residue — a continual 
saying of the same thing over and over again, helping 
nothing, elaborately beating a bush for minutes after the 
hare has been started. But I have omitted one sentence 
which, to my mind, knits up the whole rigmarole. Into 
the middle of his criticism Coleridge drops the artless 
remark, "I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may 
say so." 

(3) 

That small confession gives the secret. What would 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge have done if his murdered 

] father had arisen to him from the grave and enjoined 

fevenge? Intelligent readers of the late Mr. J. Dykes 

Campbell's life of him must know perfectly well what 

Coleridge would have done. First of all he .would have 

searched in his pockets for his tablets, which were not 

4here; next, to advance his fell purpose, he would have 

borrowed five pounds at least off Horatio; and thereupon 

iae would have wandered to live with somebody else at 



180 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Highgate (or whatever might be the corresponding suburb 
of Elsinore) and talked about what he was going to do, 
until — at the end of twenty years or so — he discussed it 
with equal prolixity as an accomplished fact. 

Coleridge was a great critic and a genius: but as 
Shakespeare imposes Hamlet on us, upon the stage, so 
he imposes Hamlet on the critic in the library. I have 
quoted a critic of genius: now let me plunge and quote 
one Carl Karpf, a German: — 

The Myths used by the poet as the foundation of Hamlet we in- 
terpret in reference to the diflferent activities personified in Hamlet 
and Laertes, the speculative and the active, the theoretic and the 
practical, the intensive and the extensive (reason and fear). In 
reference to Hamlet — the First Myth, vphich may relate to the di- 
vine Thought, founded upon the One, the First being — From the 
union of the god Odin and the giantess Jordh, the union of Spirit 
and Matter, sprang Thor. Thor carries Orvandill in a basket upon 
his back, wading through the wintry ice streams. One of Orvan- 
dill's toes, sticking out of the basket, is frozen, and thrown by Thor 
at the heavens, where it is made a star, which is now called 
Orvandill's Toe. . . . Orvandill (the Frozen Toe, the chilblain), 
(Frostieule) , is, as the lighting-spark, the hypostasis of Thor. 
. . . That the poet was acquainted with this myth, and had 
special reference to it, appears from a very significant remark of 
Hamlet, in the graveyard, in relation to the tragic singer, the first 
clown, and to his ambiguity and equivocation. After recognising 
the absolute, revealed in the tragic figure, and after emphasising the 
equivocation {Doppel-sinnigheit) which points to annihilation, 
Hamlet says, " By the Lord, Horatio, these three years I have taken 
note of it, the age is grown so picked^ that the toe of the peasant 
comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe" (Frost- 
heule). 

To resume and conclude: — 

* Steevens here remarks that this word is taken from the preening 
of birds, and we think that there is here also some allusion to self- 
evolution for the purpose of purification. 



■ HAMLET 181 

In the relation in which the star (the Frozen Toe, the chilblain) 
Orvandill stands to Thor as hypostasis, Hamlet may be regarded as 
standing to the Time-Idea and destructive moment of the force im- 
minent in nature, "nature" (comp. Sonnet 126) personified in 
the First Gravedigger (Chronos or ^on), and Hamlet appears to 
intend to say that the tragical personified activity, its own hypos- 
tasis, seeks to injure and annihilate himself. 

And, after that, he proceeds to dispute whether or no 
Hamlet was mad ! 

(4) 
These two criticisms, the subtle and the frantic, yield 
us the key to unlock, not Hamlet, but all the criticism 
that ever has been written on Hamlet. I repeat that just 
as Shakespeare in the theatre draws out each individual 
soul of the audience and so incarnates it in Hamlet, 
Prince of Denmark, that each feels " This is I," even so he 
exerts that illusion upon the several critics in their libra- 
ries, and in such strength that each, seizing a pen, starts 
(as he thinks) to interpret Hamlet : whereas, beguiled man ! 
he is all the while unconsciously revealing and appraising 
himself. E^ow, every one knows (or at any rate the 
older among us know) what tricks memory can play us, 
as every one knows how what we call Accident has a 
trick of letting us down of a sudden, at a moment when 
we are in best conceit of ourselves. I honestly reckoned 
to have made the above small discovery for myself, when 
pat upon it came the discovery that my discovery was 
no discovery at all: for I found myself staring at these 
words of Hazlitt's, which I must have read twice or 
thrice at one time or another, but hitherto carelessly: — 

Hamlet is a name: his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage 
of the poet's brain. What, then? — ^are they not real? They are 



182 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is the reader's mind. 
It is we who are Hamlet. 

And, as thougli this had not been enough, again pat upon 
it I opened a page of Victor Hugo and translated this : — 

Aloof from men, Hamlet has yet within him a something imde- 
fined which represents them all. Agnosco fratrem. If sometimes 
we felt our own pulse, we should be conscious of his fever. His 
uncanny reality is our reality, after all. He is the sad man we all 
are, in certain situations. Morbid, if you will, Hamlet expresses a 
permanent condition of man. 

There we have, yielded by one of the few worthy in 
Elysium to walk beside our poet as a peer, the key by 
which we may read all criticism of Hamlet. 

I insist that for Hamlet itself, the play, there is no 
key but what each one of us will find in his own breast. 

If the world have not so far warped or shrivelled us 
but that our hearts respond to the appeal of a noble 
nature ; if they can sympathise with one, noble and nobly 
scrupulous, faced suddenly with a sin clamouring for 
revenge, a sin contaminating his own mother; all the 
responsibility to answer murder with murder solemnly, 
by a voice from the grave, charged upon this delicate, 
sensitive, and innocent soul; why, then (I say), we can 
read Hamlet with understanding, and may leave the 
commentators alone. That is my advice: and I propose 
to do here what is not always done with one's own advice.' 
I propose to follow it. 

(5) 
But I will add one note on the history of the play 
(for this directly bears on Shakespeare's workmanship) ; 
and another on a particular detail in its history which. 



► 



HAMLET 183 

throws some illumination on a point which has puzzled 
many readers and spectators. 

Every one knows that Hamlet did not spring full-armed 
from the head of Shakespeare: that it was an old play 
huilt upon, taken down, rebuilt, and again pulled to 
pieces and rebuilt before it reached the Hamlet of the 
1623 Folio, the form in which we are familiar with it. 
There is nothing to surprise us in this: it is just what 
happened with plays in the Elizabethan theatre (as we 
call it) , and, in fact, something very like it often happens 
with a play in our own days. But about Hamlet there 
is evidence that makes it manifest. In 1603 — that is, 
twenty years before the Eirst Folio — ^we find, printed in 
Quarto, a play which is obviously our Hamlet, is assigned 
on the title-page to William Shakespeare, and yet is 
amazingly different. Omitting a German version, and 
travelling back by clue of various contemporary hints 
(allusions to Hamlet's Revenge and The Ghost), we 
pretty solidly establish that a play on the subject, named 
after Hamlet, took the boards as early as 1589 (34 years 
before we get the First Folio version), and almost as 
solidly that its author was Kyd, author of The Spanish 
Tragedie — which, by the way, Hamlet in some points 
of plot and structure curiously resembles. But it con- 
cerns us not here whether Kyd or Tom or Dick or Harry 
was the original author. The important point is that for 
thirty-odd years at least, from one form to another (in 
all its phases apparently popular), this play grew, grew 
at the back of the theatre; until at some point Shake- 
speare took a hand in its gardening and raised it to the 
miracle we knoT^. 



184. SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

So mucli for the play. But the story, with Hamlet's 
deliberate pretence of madness, was told by Saxo Gramma- 
ticus, a Danish chronicler, in the thirteenth century; was 
turned into a sort of ' historical novel ' in French by one 
Frangois de Belief orest in 1570 ; and was published soon 
after this date. It was next translated into English and 
entitled The Historie of TIamblet. I now quote Capell : — 

There can be no doubt made, by persons who are acquainted with 
these things, that the translation is not much younger than the 
French original; though the only edition of it that is yet come to 
my knowledge is no earlier than 1608; that Shakespeare took his 
play from it there can be likewise little doubt. 

'Now, why do I lay this stress upon Belleforest's story 
upon which Shakespeare, and maybe his precursor, 
pretty certainly wrought? Because I find explained in 
it, clear as daylight, one puzzle of detail which, when 
I read the play, had beaten me again and again. Or, 
rather, there was a double puzzle. I could never quite 
understand (or forgive) that Ophelia, being Ophelia, 
should so readily lend herself, in Act iii. Scene 1, to 
entrap Hamlet to confession, with the King and her father 
for eavesdroppers; as far less could I forgive Hamlet, 
a gentleman, for speaking to her (in the play-scene, for 
example) so vilely as he does. My instinct all through 
prompts me to say, " Yes, yes, you are driven. But for 
God's sake, need you speak to this child as to a strumpet ? 
O man, leave her, at least, alone ! " Allowing the most for 
Hamlet's perverted recoil against all women on fathom- 
ing his mother's guilt, I think we must all feel this. 

But I turn to Belleforest and I find that in the original 
Pphelia was a courtesan, though a kind-hearted one. Here 



HAMLET 185 

is the text. The King's advisers are puzzled by Hamlet's 
pretended madness. — 

. esteeming that under that kinde of folly there lay hidden 
a greate and rare subtility . . . for which cause they coun- 
selled the king to try and know, if possible, how to discover the 
intent and meaning of the young prince; and they could find no 
better nor more fit invention to intrap him than to set some faire 
and beautifull woman in a secret place, that with flattering speeches 
and all the craftiest meanes she could use, should purposely seek 
to allure his mind to have his pleasure of her. ... To this 
end certaine courtiers were appointed to lead Hamblet into a sol- 
itary place within the woods, whither they brought the woman. 

The story goes on that a gentleman who had been 
" nourished with Hamlet " (obviously Horatio) 

by certain signes gave Hamblet intelligence in what danger he was 
like to fall . . . if he obeyed the wanton toyes and vicious prov- 
ocations of the gentlewoman . . . but by her he was likewise in- 
formed of the treason, as being one that from her infancy loved and 
favoured him and would have been exceedingly sorrowful for his 
misfortune. 

Here was a strong dramatic situation ready to Shake- 
speare's hand. But he, in his great wisdom, preferred 
to replace this experienced lady by the innocent Ophelia — 

Nymph, in thy orisons 
Be all my sins remembered! 

This (I say) he did very wisely: but I hold that, being 
an indolent man, he failed to remove or to recast some 
sentences which, cruel enough even when spoken to a 
woman of easy virtue, are intolerable when cast at 
Ophelia. 



186 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

(6) 

I will conclude these notes of Hamlet with an observa- 
tion on Shakespeare's use of the blank verse line. It 
is late in the day. But it may come in here as well as 
anywhere: and after saying much about structure, plot, 
stage-setting, the interplay and development and handling 
of character, I cannot fairly let the reader go under the 
impression that Shakespeare's actual versification is a 
small part of his dramatic technique. 

I assume him to know something of the invention of 
English blank verse, and how Marlowe, if he did not 
invent it, made it the vehicle of Elizabethan drama. I 
assume him to know, in a general way, how Shakespeare 
used it from Love's Labour's Lost up (let us say) to 
Antony and Cleopatra, to The Tempest. I assume him 
to know, further, what Milton claimed for it, in the 
famous prefatory note to Paradise Lost, as a vehicle for 
Epic. 

But we are concerned with Drama — with English 
Drama, l^ow, if we turn to Dryden's Prefaces, and 
particularly to the Epistle Dedicatory to his play of The 
Rival Ladies, to his essay Of Dramatic Poesy and his 
Defence of that Essay, we shall find that there is no 
question whatever about the true English dramatic line 
being in hendecasyllables. ^o critic doubts this. But 
Dryden and others doubt whether we do better for 
dramatic purposes by rhyming our hendecasyllables in 
heroics or by giving them the open play (call it ' free- 
dom ' or 'license') of blank verse. When Shakespeare 
began to write, blank verse was a comparatively new in- 
vention, and we know that he — ^that his genius — steadily 



HAMLET 187 

explored and perfected it for his dramatic vehicle, more 
and more deliberately ridding his plays of rhyme. Love's 
Labour s Lost contains but 579 lines of blank verse, 1,028 
rhymes. When we reach A Winter's Tale we find 1,825 
lines of blank verse to no rhymes at all, and The Tempest 
(apart, of course, from the songs and the Masque of Iris) 
has but two rhymes to 1,458 blank verse lines. But 
then came a change of fashion, if not of considered 
opinion. About the middle of the next century, or a 
little later, Waller and others took up the rhymed heroic 
couplet and set about improving it; and at last Davenant 
boldly reintroduced it as the sole and proper vehicle for the 
drama. In Dryden's words, " if we owe the invention of it 
to Mr. Waller, we are acknowledging the noblest use of it 
to Sir William Davenant, who at once brought it upon the 
stage and made it perfect, in The Siege of Rhodes/^ 

The attempt — which had its origin, of course, in emu- 
lation of the great French playwrights of that time, with 
their rhymed alexandrines — powerfully engaged Dryden; 
and we may follow his apology for it through various 
prefaces — notably his Epistle Dedicatory to The Rival 
Ladies, his essay Of Dramatic Poesy, and his Defence of 
that essay. Now Dr^'den was a great man, a great artist, 
and (in all that concerned his art) a great gentleman. To 
borrow a phrase from N'ewman's famous description of a 
gentleman, " he may be right or wrong in his opinions ; 
but he is too clear-sighted to be unjust." So Dryden, 
together with his plea for the heroic couplet in drama, 
as fairly as he can sets forth and opposes the contra- 
account. I shall presently give reason for holding that 
he missed, though narrowly, the essential point: but his 



188 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

argument is moderate, fair, and patently that of a work- 
man who has tried both ways and brings in his report 
of them. 

Let us schedule some of the advantages he claims for 
rhyme over blank verse. — 

(1) He observes (quoting Sidney's Defence of Poesie 
in support) that rhyme is a help to memory: which 
it " so knits up by affinity of sounds that, by remem- 
bering the last word in one line we often call to 
mind both the verses." 

I will say at once that I think little of this argument, 
though he calls it " in my opinion not the least consider- 
able." Whose memory is helped ? If the actors', then 
let them take more trouble to learn their parts. If ours, 
then if we cannot remember and carry away such lines as 

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased? 
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow? 

without help of the mind diseased being eased, or the 
rooted sorrow being uprooted to-morrow, then we ought 
to be ashamed of ourselves. 

(2) " Then," he goes on, " in the quickness of repar- 
tees (which in discoursive scenes fall very often) it 
has so particular a grace, and is so aptly suited to 
them, that the sudden smartness of the answer, and the 
beauty of the rhyme, set off the beauty of each other." 

I am spared the trouble of answering this, because 
Dryden himself in his essay Of Dramatic Poesy has put 
the answer into the mouth of his supposed interlocutor 



HAMLET 189 

Crites. " THey say the quickness of reparties in argu- 
mentative scenes receives an ornament from the verse. 
'Now what is more unreasonable than to imagine that a 
man should not only light upon the wit, but the rhyme, 
toOj upon the sudden? . . . The hand of art will be 
too visible in it, against that maxim of all professions, 
Ars est celare artem. . . ." 

(3) " But that benefit which I consider most in it," 
says Dryden, " because I have not seldom found it, is 
that it bounds and circumscribes the fancy. . . . 
The great easiness of blank verse renders the poet 
too luxuriant." 

" The great easiness of blank verse " ! O Dryden ! great 
man! You wrote those words in 1664, and Paradise 
Lost was not published until three years later. And if I 
could summon you from the dead, a great awe would 
tie my tongue. But I should want to read you this : — 

^ far within 

And in their own dimensions like themselves, 
The great Seraphic Lords and Cherubim 
In close recess and secret conclave sat, 
A thousand demi-gods on golden seats. 
Frequent and full. 



Or this:- 



Yet not the more 
Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt 
Clear spring, or shadie grove, or sunny hill, 
Smit with the love of sacred song: but chief 
Thee, Sion! and the flow'ry brooks beneath 
That wash thy hallow'd feet and warbling flow, 
Nightly I visit; nor sometimes forget 
Those other two, equall'd with me in fate 



190 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

(So were I equall'd with them in renown!). 
Blind Thamyris, and blind Mseonides, 
And Teiresias and Phineus, prophets old: 
Then feed on thoughts that, voluntary, move 
Melodious numbers — as the wakeful bird 
Sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid. 
Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year 
Seasons return, but not to me returns 
Day, or the sweet approach of Even or Morn, 
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose, 
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine . . . 

Read it, ponder it: read it twenty, fifty, a hundred 
times, and while not insensible to the noble diction, mark 
— mark all the while — the exquisite slide and pause and 
balance of the caesura (so much more difficult to compass 
than any rhyme) as it moves under Milton's hand : — 

Thus with the year 
Seasons return, but not to me returns 
Day, or the sweet approach of Even or Morn, 
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose. 
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine. 

" Easy " ? That " easy " ? Why, it is fit to make one 
weep over the unattainable, and this man's mastery of it ! 

(T) 

But let me appeal from Dryden's theory to his own 
practice. I choose, quite at random, half-a-dozen heroic 
couplets of his, from The Indian Emperor (Act ii, 
Scene 4). 

Cydaria. Your gallants, sure, have little eloquence: 

Failing to move the soul, they court the sense 
With pomp and trains and in a crowd they woo, 
Where true felicity is but in two. 
But can such toys your woman's passion move? 
This is but noise and tumult, 'tis not love. 



I 



HAMLET 191 

Cortez. I have no reason, madam, to excuse 

Those ways of gallantry I did not use: 
My love was true, and on a nobler score. 

Cydaria. " Your love," alas ! Then have you loved before ? 

Let US set against this a blank verse passage from 
Dryden's Don Sebastian, where the hero counsels the 
captive queen Almeyda against self-destruction. 

Death may be called in vain, and cannot come: 
Tyrants can tie him up from your relief; 
Nor has a Christian privilege to die. 
i Alas! thou art too young in thy new faith! 

Brutus and Cato might discharge their souls. 
And give them furloughs for another world; 
But we, like sentries, are condemned to stand 
In starless night, and wait the appointed hour.* 

I It is easy to see that these two passages differ in dra- 
matic feeling: and almost as easy to see what ails the one 
first quoted. At the close of each distich, of each rhymed 
couplet, it ' shuts up.' — The stuff is good ; but we get it 
in short monotonous doses. 

* Dryden, bold thief, stole this idea out of Spenser {Faerie 
Queene. Book I, Canto 9), as Blair, author of the much admired 
poem The Grave, afterwards lifted words and idea together out of 
Don Beiastian, and spoiled them hopelessly: 

Spenser. the terme of life is limited 

Ne may a man prolong nor shorten it; 
The souldier may not move from watchfull sted, 
Nor leave his stand until his captain bid. 

Blair. Our time is fix'd, and all our days are number'd: 

How long, how shon, we know not: — This we know. 
Duty requires we calmly wait the summons, 
Nor dare to stir till Heav'n shall give permission: 
Like sentries that must keep their destin'd stand. 
And wait th' appointed hour till they're reliev'd. 



192 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

With pomp and trains and in a crowd they woo. 
When true felicity is meant for two. 

(Selah) 
But can such toys your women's passions move? 
This is but noise and tumult, 'tis not love. 

(Selah) 

ITow this conclusive stroke of the distich is excellent 
when closing a Shakespearian sonnet — as — 

If this be error, and upon me proved, 
I never writ, or no man ever loved. 

It is excellent as rounding off, containing, completing 
an epigram of Pope's — 



Or 



Or 



Good nature a good sense must ever join: 
To err is human, to forgive divine. 



Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, 
Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be. 



Words are like leaves; and when they most abound 
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found. 



But the rhythm of drama, of action, of life, is and should 
be nothing like that clue of a sonnet, this accomplished 
turn of an epigram. Life is not like a maxim of La 
Rochefoucauld's : it goes on and on and on. The ' snap of 
the snuff-box ' may be used in drama — Shakespeare often 
uses it to round off an Act, a signal to the man in the 
wings to drop the curtain. In Hamlet, for example : — 

The play's the thing ^ 

Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king. 



HAMLET 193 

Here it makes a temporary conclusion. At the vevj end 
of the tragedy we get it with a broken close — 

Take up the bodies: such a sight as this 
Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss. 
Go, bid the soldiers shoot. 

But for the play itself — for drama, which is action, — 
to convey the multitudinous rhythm of life, broken yet 
harmonious, continuous, various, out of itself unfolding, 
in a moment responding to sudden thoughts, interruptions, 
gusts of passion, changings of mind, ardours, repentings, 
dejections, interchange of eyes, quick embraces of the 
young, slow deathbeds of the old: for all this the artist 
must have something infinitely more free, pliant, and sub- 
tle than the rhymed heroic couplet ever was or ever could 
be : something infinitely more free, pliant, supple than the 
French alexandrine. Though by their exquisite intona- 
tion French actors disguise the sameness and tameness of 
the French alexandrine, yet the point is that their art is 
disguising, all the while: they are doing it in spite of 
the monotonous verse. But all the while, as Shakespeare 
mastered it, the English unrhymed iambic line, with its 
freedom and play of csesura, is helping the actor. 

The following famous passage, carefully read aloud, 
will support, better than argument, my claim for this 
pliant capacity for blank verse, when blank verse is 
written by a Shakespeare: — 

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! 
Is it not monstrous that this player here, 
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion. 
Could force his soul so to his own conceit 
That from her working all his visage wann'd; 



194 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Tears in his eyea, distraction in 's aspect, 

A broken voice, and his whole function suiting 

With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing! 

For Hecuba! 

What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, 

That he should weep for her? What would he do. 

Had he the motive and the cue for passion 

That I have? He would drown the stage with tears 

And cleave the general ear with horrid speech. 

Make mad the guilty and appal the free. 

Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed 

The very faculties of eyes and ears. 

Yet I, 

A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak, 

Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, 

And can say nothing; no, not for a king, 

Upon whose property and most dear life 

A damn'd defeat was made. Am I a coward? 

Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across? 

Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face? 

Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i' the throat, 

As deep as to the lungs? who does me this? 

Ha! 

'Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be 

But I am pigeon-liver'd and lack gall 

To make oppression bitter, or ere this 

I should have fatted all the region kites 

With this slave's offal: bloody, bawdy villain! 

Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain! 

O, vengeance! 

Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave, 

That I, the eon of a dear father murder'd. 

Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, 

Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words. 

And fall a-cursing, like a very drab, 

A scullion! 

Fie upon't ! fob ! About, my brain ! Hum, I have heard 

That guilty creatures, sitting at a play. 

Have by the very cunning of the scene 

Been struck so to the soul that presently 

They have proclaim'd their malefactions; 

For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak 

With most miraculous organ. I'll have these players 



HAMLET 



195 



Play something like the murder of my father 
Before mine uncle: I'll observe his looks; 
I'll tent him to the quick: if he but blench, 
I know my course. The spirit that I have seen 
May be the devil; and the devil hath power 
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps 
Out of my weakness and my melancholy. 
As he is very potent with such spirits, 
Abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds 
More relative than this. The play's the thing 
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king. 



[Eofit. 



CHAPTER XI 

SHAKESPEARE'S LATER 
WORKMANSHIP 

The last group of plays — General characteristics — Some striking 
resemblances — One common theme, a woman wrongfully used — Neg- 
lect of Unity of Time — ^Alleged decline in power — The agony of 
Imogen — The reconciliation of man with man — The artist's last in- 
firmity — Shakespeare's theme and stage limitations — Probable devel- 
opment of scenic resources in the Elizabethan stage — Influence of 
the masque — Sea-scenes — Reconciliation through the young and for 
the young — Blending of tragedy and comedy. 

(1) 

I PROPOSE in this paper to offer some general observa- 
tions on Shakespeare's later workmanship, and hereafter 
to deal in detail with Pericles, King Henry VIII, Cym- 
heline. The Winters Tale, The Tempest, as exemplify- 
ing it. I choose these five plays because almost all schol- 
ars and critics agree to include them, as they do not agree 
to include others, among the last heirs of Shakespeare's 
invention. Scholars and critics, to be sure, have their 
individual caprices, their wayward and often amusing 
crotchets. Gervinus, for example, chose to polarise 
Pericles with Titus Andronicus: Dr. Courthope will have 
The Tempest to be an early play: and I have even heard 
All's Well That Ends Well plausibly upheld to be one of 
the last. But these are truancies from the broad road 
of consent, and to follow them here would be a waste of 
time. For I believe that, as the reader goes along with 
me, we shall casually collect evidence that each of the 

196 



I 



SHAKESPEARE'S LATER WORKMANSHIP 197 

five belongs, as we possess it, to the last years of Shake- 
speare's life, as the five together v^ill be sufficient for our 
enquiry, What in those last years was he trying to do, 
and how was he doing it? 

(2) 

Quite apart from external evidence many critics have 
noted a temperament or " atmosphere " common to these 
plays (or to all but King Henry VIII; which stands 
apart for many reasons) : an atmosphere quite unlike that 
which pervades the great agonising tragedies of Macbeth, 
Hamlet, Othello, King Lear; although in structure and 
motive Cymheline reminds us of Lear and Othello, The 
Winter s Tale of Othello, a scene in Pericles of a scene in 
Macbeth. Even further are we removed in these plays 
from the hot passion of Antony and Cleopatra, the 
coarse fierce cynicism of Troilus and Cressida, the cold 
opposition of character in Coriolanus, the turgid mis- 
anthropy of Timon of Athens. 

Of a sudden, as the critics agree in pointing out, the 
hard shadows melt. Consummate tragic intensity has al- 
ready weakened; there are to be no more Othellos, no more 
Macbeths. Passion, cynicism, fierce judgment, fade into 
a benign permeating charitable sunset. 

The soul'a dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd, 
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made 

— and the light is not earthly. Even the fairies, who were 
such positive Warwickshire imps, have turned to angels, 
influences. Robin Goodfellow has " followed darkness like 
a dream " and become Ariel. Man, whom Shakespeare 



198 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

no more feared to depict as brutal than as godlike, goes 
brutally as ever to shipwreck in the first Scene of The 
Tempest, is cast through 

the foam 
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn, 

and emerges upon an elfin shore where spirits harp on 
dying gales ; where one shipwrecked courtier notes " The 
air breathes upon us here most sweetly," and another, 
rubbing his eyes, — 

How lush and lusty the grass looks! how green! . . . But the 
rarity of it is . . . that our garments, being as they were drenched 
in the sea, hold notwithstanding their freshness and glosses, being 
rather new-dyed than stained with salt water ... as fresh as when 
we put them on in Africa, at the marriage of the King's fair 
daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis. 

As I say, many critics have noted this mellowly ro- 
mantic atmosphere; that it pervades all Shakespeare's 
last work and is, in fact, as truly characteristic of it as 
any of the date-marks we detect in phrasing or in 
versification. We shall (I hope) take full account of it 
before we have done. But let us start with resemblances 
more definite: threads that we can touch and follow as 
clues connecting, this way and that, one with another of 
our five plays, or two with a third, or three with a fourth. 
The fifth — King Henry VIII — we must let stand some- 
what apart ; not only for some special reasons to be given, 
but for the broad and general reason that being a his- 
torical play it differs from the other four in scheme and 
purpose, and the limits imposed on invention. A drama- 
tist may, indeed, play tricks with history: but he cannot 



SHAKESPEARE'S LATER WORKMANSHIP 199 

plaj with it as with pure fiction. History, as Aristotle 
puts it, tells us what a certain known man, Alcibiades, 
did or suffered. To be sure, if our particular Alcibiades 
be as far removed out of men's memory or written record 
as (say) King Lear or King Cymbeline or the Caliph 
Haroun Alraschid, we can melt him almost into a pure 
creature of fiction. But Shakespeare, who could do this 
with Lear and Cymbeline, obviously could not do it with 
Henry the Eighth. And even to-day, after the lapse of 
four hundred years, a cautious playwright would avoid 
choosing Henry the Eighth as the hero of a drama that 
either turned on celibate renunciation or called itself All 
for Love, or The World Well Lost. 

(3) 

For a start, then, upon our list of curious resemblances, 
we observe that — 

Every one of these plays — including even Henry VIII 
— ^which has no business to do anything of the kind 
' — ends happily. Cymbeline happens to be labelled " A 
Tragedy," but in fact is no more tragic than The Win- 
ter's Tale, labelled " A Comedy." Both alike work 
upon cruel passions, to end in a general reconcilement. 
To put the converse — The Winter s Tale, built on a mo- 
tive of cruel passion, has no more right to be called a 
comedy than the other to be called a tragedy. You will 
find it hard to invent any two categories separating the 
pair. The Winter's Tale, " a Comedy," turns on the 
wrong done to a good woman, a wife cruelly suspected, 
afterwards for a while supposed to be lost, in the end 
restored to the arms of her repentant husband. But so does 



200 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Cymheline, " a Tragedy," with quite as happy a result. 
And if it be urged that Shakespeare had once already, in 
Much Ado about Nothing, built a comedy on this plot, I 
shall answer that he did it by cleverly distracting our 
interest, upon Beatrice and Benedick; that Much Ado 
was a comedy in spite of its main plot; and finally that 
angry suspicion of an innocent feeling woman, driving 
to the issue (whether happy or not) through the torture 
of her soul, is no proper motive of Comedy, however you 
define Comedy. 

Let us not then waste time in setting up between 
Tragedy and Comedy nice boundaries which these five 
plays remarkably ignore. However he treats it, we can 
see that Shakespeare's mind is playing with variations 
upon a theme that in one way or another keeps vexing 
him — that of a woman wrongfully used. We see this 
in King Henry VIII as well as in The Winters Tale 
and Cymheline. 

We see, further, how constantly forgiving the woman 
is. She always is so in Shakespeare. Hermione and 
Imogen do but repeat the wrongs and forgiveness of Hero 
and Helena. 

Yet further we observe how constantly, in these later 
plays, the wronged woman is righted. Shakespeare's 
great tragedies (as we call them) have no room for such 
charity. Ophelia is thrust aside and goes under. The 
entirely innocent Desdemona is led relentlessly to her bed 
and her death. But Imogen is Desdemona rejudged and 
tenderly vindicated. 



SHAKESPEARE'S LATER WORKMANSHIP 201 

(4) 
To come to a more technical point, all these last plays 
(all but Th& Tempest) show, whether wilfully or of 
necessity, a common disobedience to what is called " Unity 
of Time." I pass by King Henry VIII, which neglects 
or overrides this, as every pageant must. But Pericles, 
Cymbeline, The ^Vinters Tale cover whole lifetimes of 
their dramatis personw. Between one Act and another 
twenty years or more may be supposed to be dropped. 
The dramatist has many devices for carrying us over the 
intervals. In Pericles, for example, he introduces be- 
tween each separate Act the old poet Gower as prologue 
and artificial scene-shifter, saying in effect, " So far we 
have conducted our story. ISTow transfer your minds, 
if you please, to Tyre or Mitylene : suppose that so many 
years have elapsed: and give your kind attention to the 
next scene on the film." In The Winter s Tale, having 
to skip sixteen years after Act iii, he boldly hales in 
Father Time with an hour-glass, and not only makes him 
apologise for sliding over the interval but uses him as pro- 
logue to a second intrigue. — 

Imagine me, 
Gentle spectators, that I now may be 
In fair Bohemia; and remember well 
I mentioned a son o' the King's, which Florizel 
I now name to you ; and with speed so pace 
[ To speak of Perdita. 

Now that is pure ' fake.' Shakespeare, having proposed 
to himself a drama in which a wronged woman has to 
bear a child, who has to be lost for years and restored to 



202 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

her as a grown girl, simply did not know how to do it, 
save by invoking some such device. 

His difficulty lay in the nature of things. In the nature 
of things, any engagement of human will or passion comes 
naturally to a point of issue ; the conflict or explosion, as 
exhibited in drama, may be as sharp as you please: but 
just as naturally the process of cooling, of appeasement, 
of repentance, of forgiveness is patient and slow. This, 
too, may be brought dramatically to a point, but it takes 
time. 

We should bear this constantly in mind when we are 
tempted, contrasting Shakespeare's later work with the 
great tragic masterpieces — Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, 
Lear — to say that it betrays a decline in mental power. A 
loss of mastery there is, an apparent relaxation of grip on 
the means to the end. But these do not prove any slack- 
ening of mental power. It may more likely be that, hav- 
ing triumphed in the possible, this magnificent workman 
has grown discontented with it and started out to con- 
quer the impossible, or the all but impossible. Sharp sud- 
den retribution upon crime — " God's Revenge against 
Murder," as the old book has it — the awful awakening 
of (Edipus, the swift slaughter that in the last Scene 
of Hamlet wipes out score after score and leaves the stage 
piled with corpses — these effects have always lain within 
the range of drama. " proud death ! " gasps Fortinbras 
on the threshold — 

What feast is toward in thine eternal cell? — 
and Horatio, the sane, sad man, answers him — 

Give order that these bodies 
High on a stage be placed to the view; 



SHAKESPEARE'S LATER WORKMANSHIP 203 

And let me speak to the yet-unknowing world 

How these things came about; so shall you hear 

Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts, 

Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters. 

Of deaths put on by cunning and forc'd cause. 

And, in this upshot, purposes mistook 

Fall'n on th' inventors' heads. 



If I may say it reverently, human forgiveness for the 
wrong that men do to us — such forgiveness, for example, as 
Imogen extends — has something nobler in it than any re- 
venge, even than God's revenge against murder. I shall 
not argue this as a theologian, since Shakespeare did not 
write plays for an audience of theologians. I simply place 
myself alongside of the reader, both of us as spectators in 
The Globe Theatre, Blackfriars. Do we not feel, that 
though we may talk of God's being injured, insulted, 
wounded by our sins. He cannot (being so great and 
above rivalry and enormously magnanimous) be injured 
by Posthumus's cruel wrong as Imogen is injured? It 
costs Him so much less! It costs Imogen all she has in 
the world. It is not for her life she pleads, but for death, 
as she stands " the elected deer " before Pisanio : 

Prithee, despatch: 
The lamb entreats the butcher: where's thy knife? 
Thou art too slow to do thy master's bidding 
When I desire it too! 

Hear her, a half-minute later, utter the soul of her 

reproach : — 

Talk thy tongue weary; speak; 
I have heard I am a strumpet; and mine ear. 
Therein false struck, can take no greater wound, 
Nor tent to bottom that! 



204 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Hear her, lastly, with what bitter desperate contempt she 
answers Pisanio when he — soft, honest man — ^proposes 
that she shall escape death and hide. You can feel her 
sad gaze searching into his stupid brain: 

Why, good fellow, 
What shall I do the while ? Where bide ? how live ? 
Or in my life what comfort, when I am 
Dead to my husband? 

What can any Deity suffer comparable with that? How 
can any God of our conception vie for our pity against 
this woman ? God has so many things to fall back upon ! 
Imogen, losing this, has lost all: she that was infinitely 
rich in one little thing, deprived of it is infinitely ruined. 
The very frailty of the wronged one makes the act of for- 
giveness the more heroic. The reader and I are — let me 
repeat and insist — seated in a theatre, watching a play. 
There a deadly hurt, done upon a Deity who can take 
care of himself, awakes small resentment in comparison 
with a deadly hurt done upon a woman, l^ay, the best 
of our emotion springs directly from our sense that she 
is a woman, and weak : and, further yet, when such weak- 
ness, persecuted back upon the soul's last innermost 
citadels of love, finds the great reinforcement there and 
in due time marches out victorious, to forgive, we wit- 
ness something which accords with the noblest we ask of 
human life. 

If my argument, so far, be sound, it follows that 
Shakespeare in his later plays, which (by consent) deal 
with human forgiveness, atonement, reconciliation, was 
not necessarily a weaker workman than the Shakespeare 
who triumphed in Macbeth and Othello; but, likely 



I 



SHAKESPEARE'S LATER WORKMANSHIP 205 

enough, the same excellent workman passing on to attempt 
a far more difficult thing than any justification, by a 
stroke, of the ways of God to man: passing on to attempt 
the reconciliation, by slow process under God, of man 
with man. 

(5) 

I break off here, to advance three propositions. 

(1) My first is, that every inventive artist of the first 
class — and I will instance Shakespeare, Moliere, Dickens 
— ^tires of repeating his successes, but never of repeating 
his experiments. A Wordsworth will do amazing things 
for three or four years and thenceforward will content 
himself with fiddling on the same string until he has 
frayed it into utter tenuity. But your inventive master 
never cares for a success but as a step to something fur- 
ther. What he tries may be worse ; what he achieves may 
be (as the saying goes) unworthy of his powers : but he is 
still trying ; from one height which we applaud as consum- 
mate he springs for another which is (if you will) impos- 
sible; and to miss is to land in a pit. But he has the 
divinest of discontent, a discontent with achievement. He 
is still a learner. Of our English creative writers I have 
quoted Jowett's opinion that Dickens comes next, in fulness 
of genius, after Shakespeare, and here is what William 
Ernest Henley has to say upon Dickens : — 

The freshness and fun of Pickwick . . . seem mainly due to high 
spirits; and perhaps that immortal book should be described as a 
first improvisation by a young man of genius not yet sure of either 
expression or ambition and with only vague and momentary ideas 
about the duties and necessities of art. But from Pickwick onwards 
to Edwin Drood the effort after improvement is manifest. What are 
Pombey and Dorrit themselves but the failures of a great and 



206 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

serious artist? . . . He had enchanted the public without an effort; 
he was the best-beloved of modern writers almost from the outset 
of his career. But he had in him at least as much of the French 
artist as of the middle-class Englishman; and if all his life he 
never ceased from education, but went unswervingly in pursuit of 
culture, it was out of love for his art and because his conscience as 
an artist would not let him do otherwise. 

So it was with Shakespeare. In taking the theme of 
Othello and altering it into The Winter s Tale, as in 
taking the theme of Lear and altering it into Cymheline, 
he failed, if we will; but he failed by no intellectual de- 
cline ; rather, in the attempt to achieve something better, 
certainly more difficult, possibly beyond reach. 

(2) We may reasonably allow, moreover, that a great 
artist, choosing to abandon something he has done con- 
summately for a shot at a longer range, is liable to score a 
miss ; and so patently, that in proportion as we applauded 
Macbeth or Othello for masterpieces we are tempted to 
groan over Pericles or Cymheline as, in workmanship, 
puerile, l^ow actually (as later I shall attempt to prove) 
the workmanship of Cymheline, wherever Shakepeare 
gets a chance to play the old hand, is masterly, and 
the final scene almost the last word in dramatic skill: 
as I hope also to demonstrate that nine-tenths of 
the weakness of Pericles is most likely not chargeable 
upon Shakespeare at all, and certainly not chargeable 
upon the Shakespeare of that period, the playwright who 
had Macbeth and Othello standing to his record. Still it 
remains true that, when we get down to unmistakable 
work of 1610 or thereabouts, among strokes which at- 
test the master, immixed with them and all the more 
flagrant by reason of the contrast, are many fumbling 



SHAKESPEARE'S LATER WORKMANSHIP 207 

touches: and my contention is — inviting the reader to 
understand an artist's mind in operation — that such mis- 
fires are incident to the greatest artists when they turn 
from the dazzle of past achievement to attempt new range- 
finding shots into an unknown country. 

But (3) lastly, on this point let us note how sincerely 
the man deals. He is occupied with forgiveness, recon- 
ciliation, the adjustment, under Heaven, of good-will 
among men. But injured women do not forgive in a 
moment; stubborn enemies are not reconciled in a mo- 
ment; old wrongs, hates, injuries, jealousies, suspicions 
are not allayed, redeemed, repented of, forgiven in a 
moment and made to acquiesce. The process is naturally 
a slow one: and its perfect success in actual life, if it is 
to be a durable appeasement and not a flash in the pan, 
usually depends upon its overmastering a real — often a 
prolonged and obstinate, — but always a real resistance. 
To forgive our enemies, to yield to conviction against 
our will — I put it to the reader as to a man of the world 
that, if their results are to be of any worth, these are 
naturally slow processes. To be sure, the final act of 
surrender, the stroke of return upon ourselves, may hap- 
pen in a moment : but the meaning lies all in the continued 
sap and siege. 

On the other hand, the working dramatist, having to 
tell his complete story in three hours and by presented 
action, is at every turn invited to concentrate his effects, 
to bring all to a stroke which staggers or astounds. The 
way of the stage is the way of a flash of lightning; it is 
not the way of a long-drawn composing sunset. 

In short, Shakespeare's aim in these last plays has 



208 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

brought him at last ' up against ' the limitations of his 
art: which commonly happens in the end to men of 
genius who have mastered their craft within its technical 
limits. They arrive at a point where they have to posit 
this question : " I have done all that this art of mine ap- 
parently allows. But it ought to allow more. Art ought 
to be coextensive and coterminous with life. Can I not 
break this or that technical barrier, to enlarge it ? " 

ISTow the drama was Shakespeare's medium. Without 
raising the question that life cannot be represented as a 
whole, but only in this or that aspect, by the separate 
arts of painting, sculpture, poetry, history, the drama, 
the epic; that no single art can ever hope to embrace it; 
I suggest that we ought to honour Shakespeare the more 
because, at the height of his skill, seeking to present a 
noble thing in life which the rules of his craft seemed to 
disallow, he turned his back on past success, defied the 
technical bars, and risked a made reputation — nay, cast 
it aside as one might cast an old cloak — to follow 
Nature. 

Let us descend again these high problems of art 
to note certain small technical resemblances in our five 
plays. 

(6) 
It is fairly evident to me that whilst Shakespeare was 
writing, the Burbages and others had been steadily in- 
creasing the scenic resources of the Elizabethan stage. 
I like to think that Shakespeare was all the while helping 
them with advice and suggestions; as he was certainly a 
party to the coup by which, on Christmas Eve 1598 — ^to 



SHAKESPEARE'S LATER WORKMANSHIP 209 

outwit a landlord who had exorbitantly raised their 
ground-rent — in the small hours of the morning the Bur- 
bages took down the whole structure of their theatre in 
Shoreditch, lock, stock and barrel, and carted it across 
the Bridge to a plot of land they had secretly purchased 
in the Clink Liberty. We know that Shakespeare had 
a monetary interest in the Globe Theatre; a very am- 
bitious speculation in its day and as a building one of the 
sights of London. And a reasonable knowledge of the 
world should assure us that when art such as the Eliza- 
bethan drama catches popularity, takes hold of the town, 
becomes the Court fashion, not only writers and actors, 
but carpenters, mechanicians, scene-painters — all con- 
comitant in the business — vie with new inventions to im- 
prove it. That is business; that is how men behave. If 
the Shakespearean theatre had not improved, and even 
feverishly improved, its scenic capacities in the heyday 
of the Shakespearean drama, it must have contradicted 
every law of supply and demand. 

But we have positive evidence, of which I will give 
you two or three items. We know, to begin with, that 
the Globe Theatre was set on fire and destroyed, on June 
29th, 1613, through being too ambitious and letting off, 
in the wings, a salvo of chamber-cannon during an early 
performance (may-be the very first) of King Henry VIII, 
one of the plays we are considering. Act i. Scene 4, 
1. 48, was the fatal point, and the signal a stage direction 
— " Drum and trumpets; chambers discharge.'^ Where- 
upon Wolsey, with proleptic significance, is made to ex- 
claim, " What's that ? " and his Chamberlain, " Look out 
there, some of ye ! " 



210 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Again, whereas in Twelfth Night Shakespeare has to 
start his play on the morrow of a shipwreck, in The 
Tempest he opens with the actual scene of one. 

Again let us take the great ' recognition ' scene in 
Pericles (Act v, Sc. 1) and study the stage directions. 
They begin 

On board Pericles' ship off Mitylene. A close pavilion on deck, 
with a curtain before it; Pericles within it, reclined on a couch, 

— all easy enough. The close pavilion is the alcove un- 
der the old Elizabethan stage-gallery. It was usually cur- 
tained. Curtained or uncurtained, it served for Imogen's 
or Prospero's cave, Juliet's vault, Polonius' hiding-place, 
Desdemona's bed, and so on. But now mark the 
addition : — 

A barge lying beside the Tyrian vessel. Enter two sailors, one 
belonging to the Tyrian vessel, the other to the barge. 

A little way on — 

The Gentlemen and the two sailors descend, and go on board the 
barge. Enter from thence Lysimachua and Lords 

Lysimachus whispers a Lord, who goes off in the barge. 
Again, at 1. 64, the barge reappears and Marina dis- 
embarks. 

The question whether or not in his later plays Shake- 
speare has at his service some kind of painted scenery is a 
nice one, and would take us here too long to discuss. 
But that he had some newly-invented mechanism at his 
disposal the business of the scene hardly leaves in doubt. 

For another point — All these plays include a dance 
in masquerade or a supernatural vision; and most of 



SHAKESPEARE'S LATER WORKMANSHIP 211 

them include both. Now the Visions in King Henry 
VIII and The Tempest are good enough: but I suppose 
that those in Pericles and Cymheline may fairly be reck- 
oned as two of the worst futilities in the whole text of 
Shakespeare as we have it. And here comes in an odd- 
ity: that the most inept and ill-written and artistically 
childish thing in Pericles — the vision of Diana — occurs 
in the very heart of the best writing in the play ; so that, 
while all else in the scene vindicates it as late work by 
force of poetry, this interlude with its skimble-skamble 
lines leads quite as effectively to the same conclusion. 

We all know that towards the close of Shakespeare's 
life the masque was coming more and more into fashion ; 
and how Ben Jonson took it up and developed it with the 
help of scenic inventions by Inigo Jones. — Juno descend- 
ing from the clouds, Leda riding in on a swan, "Venus 
with a chariot of doves, the Graces sliding down a rain- 
bow held by Iris. ... It seems pretty clear that in 
his later days, as this movement caught hold on the pub- 
lic taste, Shakespeare began by employing its machinery 
to produce supernatural effects genuinely dramatic and 
genuinely poetical — such as the apparition of Banquo at 
the feast, the ghost on the midnight platform of Elsinore : 
as also that he half mockingly used the device of the 
Interlude in the play-scene in Hamlet, at first venting 
his irony on the players and anon converting it to his own 
artistic purpose. But it is also evident to me that as 
the taste for ' Visions ' — preferably for visions of classical 
goddesses — grew upon the public, Shakespeare, loathing 
the fashion, had to yield further and further to it: 
and it is possible to hold that he paid his ironical hom- 



212 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

age to the fashion either by writing these scenes as badly 
as he could or by leaving the writing of them to any 
chance hack. — 

No more, thou thunder-master, show 

Thy spite on mortal flies: 
With Mars fall out, with Juno chide. 

That thy adulteries 

Rates and revenges. 
Hath my poor boy done aught but well. 

Whose face I never saw? 
I died whilst in the womb he stay'd 

Obeying Nature's law. 

If Shakespeare wrote that, Shakespeare was deliberately 
playing the fool. 

Indeed, turning to Act iv, Scene 1, of The Tempest, 
and considering it beside these other interludes, I feel 
inclined to suggest that some of the impatience (so un- 
accountable to Miranda) — 

Never till this day 
Saw I him touch'd with anger so distemper'd — 

which Prospero exhibits as he closes the Masque of Iris, 

is not wholly unconnected with scorn of a performance 

which to the fine spirit Ariel he has already described as 

" another trick." 

Go bring the rabble. 
O'er whom I gave thee power, here to this place. 
Incite them to quick motion: for I must 
Bestow upon the eyes of this young couple 
Some vanity of mine art. It is my promise. 
And they expect it from me. 

For a last minor point common to these later dramas 
I would have the reader observe how prominent a part is 



SHAKESPEARE'S LATER WORKMANSHIP 213 

played in them by the sea, with its adventurings, its ship- 
wrecks, castings-ashore, recognitions, appeasements afar 
of jealousies and cabals begun at home. All the true 
Pericles begins and ends on shipboard. Even Bohemia 
has its sea-coast, on which the waif Perdita is cast. At the 
critical point in Cymheline — Heaven knows why — every 
character in the play has all sail set for Milford Haven ; 
and The Tempest is The Tempest. In this again we may 
suspect an improvement in mere stage mechanism as well 
as catch a hint of a great wise mind voyaging out for a 
shore, somewhere within the ring of the " still-vex'd Ber- 
moothes," where all this human evil is composed. I have 
read and marked disquisitions by learned men gravely 
doubting if Shakespeare, a Warwickshire man, ever saw 
the sea in his life. His knowledge of it is so different 
from theirs who have so regularly spent their vacations 
at the sea-side and watched the bathing-machines come 
rolling in! 

m 

But by far the most important point of likeness in 
these later plays is that they all deal with human recon- 
cilement: and of that reconcilement by far the most im- 
portant point of likeness is that it always comes about 
j through the young and for the young. Throughout his 
last years it would seem that Shakespeare's mind brooded 
li over one hope, now playing with it and anon fiercely as- 
t serting it, — " The sins of the fathers shall not be visited 
on the children ! " Perdita shall be happy with Florizel, 
Miranda with Ferdinand. The turbulence of Henry 
iVIII shall end with a christening. Imogen shall be 



214. SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

clasped by her lord and her brothers inherit a kingdom. 
She shall have her happy hour with her father, as 
Marina with Pericles, as Cordelia with Lear — and not 
die of it, as poor Cordelia died. 

!N'ot one of these five plays can be labelled " Comedy " 
or " Tragedy." All end happily ; but all fetch happiness 
to shore out of shipwreck and suffering. Some, as we 
proceed to examine them, we shall perceive to be weak. 
But even in their weakness we shall perceive the effort 
of an artist whose later word, after he had sounded 
Comedy and Tragedy, from As You Like It to Othello, 
was " Behold, I will make all things new." 



CHAPTER XII 

"PERICLES" AND "KING 
HENRY VIII" 

Popularity of Pericles — A new sensation — Epic in terms of drama 
— The authorship of the first two Acts — The evidence of workman- 
ship — Verse tests — Authenticity of the brothel scenes — The recogni- 
tion scene — The different verdict of the library and of the stage — 
Historical plays as pageants — The authorship of Henry VIII — Moral 
unity the highest. 

(1) 

Heminge and Condell excluded Pericles^ Prince of 
Tyre, from their First Folio edition of Shakespeare in 
1623 ; nor did it appear among his collected plays until the 
Third Folio of 1664. Yet Heminge and Condell must have 
been familiar with it : for it happened to earn a very con- 
siderable popular success. For this we have not only the 
silent evidence of the book-trade — it was published in 
quarto, with Shakespeare's name, in 1609, and repub- 
lished in the same year; a third quarto appeared in 1611 ; 
a fourth in 1619; a fifth in 1630; a sixth in 1635— We 
have assertative evidence as well. The first quarto, on the 
title-page, boldly advertises it as " The late and much ad- 
mired play called Pericles, Prince of Tyre" One Rob- 
ert Tailor, in the prologue to The Hogge hath lost his 
Pearle, writes : 

And if it prove so happy as to please. 
We'll say 'tis fortunate like Pericles. 

215 



216 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

and, in 1646, one S. Shepherd: 

With Sophocles we may 
Compare great Shakespeare: Aristophanes 
Never like him his Fancy could display — 
Witness the Prince of Tyre, his Pericles. 

Lastly, testimony to the play's success with the public 
is accumulated, as on a backwash, by the number of 
critics who notice it to reprobate it; beginning with Ben 
Jonson and his characteristic sneer: 

Some mouldy • tale 
Like Pericles. 

The play, then, certainly achieved success in its day, 
though it were but (as the French say) a success of 
scandal. I think there may have been another reason 
for its taking the town. It gave — like the " revue " or 
the cinema of to-day — a new sensation. We may call 
these new sensations cheap, vulgar, tawdry; and so per- 
haps they are. We may, comparing even Pericles with 
Hamlet, demand of the public 

Have you eyes? 
Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed, 
And batten on this moor? Ha! have you eyes? 

But Shakespeare, like every other great dramatist, 
wrote for his public; and we, laying aside our account 
with human frailty, must note that in art, as in life, men 
will have reaction, novelty — reaction even from the best; 
that transience qualifies even the attainment of a Phei- 

* The curious epithet " mouldy " agrees with our theory — ^that 
Pericles was an old play exhumed. 



" PERICLES " AND " KING HENRY VIII » 217 

dias, a Raphael, or a Shakespeare, because transience 
lies at the root and runs in the sap of all human pleasure. 
We cannot even conceive of human enjoyment apart from 
this qualifying transience. Good folk (as I observe 
them), being quite unable to imagine Eternity — ^that im- 
mense emptiness in which Time is not, and to-day and 
yesterday and to-morrow and a thousand years are as one ; 
in the awful space of which everything stands still; in 
which the man who died in this war is alive and with- 
out apprehension of any war ; in which the most exquisite 
flower of pleasure known to us has neither season in which 
to unfold, nor season through which to fade — good folk, 
unable to imagine this, or at any rate to keep a hold on 
such a conception, reduce it to Everlasting Life, Ever- 
lasting Bliss, which are simply life and bliss conceived 
in an endless prolonging of Time. Take it so, and I ask : 
How is our conception of everlasting bliss, of any bliss 
at once intense, ecstatic and perpetual, to be referred to 
any happiness of which any one of us has had experience ? 
As Jowett puts it drily, in his introduction to Plato's 
PJicedo : 

Where is the pain that does not become deadened after a thousand 
years? Or what is the nature of that pleasure or happiness which 
never wearies by monotony? Earthly pleasures and pains are short 
in proportion as they are keen; of any others which are both intense 
and lasting, we can form no idea. ... To beings constituted as we 
are, the monotony of singing Psalms would be as great an affliction 
as the pains of hell, and might even be pleasantly interrupted by 
them. 

We are men, in short ; " sublunary things " ; and our 
best in art, which in overweening moments we call " im- 
mortal," is by its very nature the slave of transience. 



218 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

" There is nothing immortal but immortality," says Sir 
Thomas Browne. " The form decays," says Wordsworth. 

The form decays, the function never dies. 

" The form decays " : there are to be no more Macbeths, 
no more Othellos, because men will not have them — and 
Shakespeare himself consigns to their demand for novel- 
ties. The " function " continues in chase of new 
experiments. 

The public, on the one hand, has a craving for novelties 
in art; and the artist, on the other, a correspondent crav- 
ing to invent them — and not, be it noted, a base 
craving, merely to open a new market, but a spiritual 
ambition, the last infirmity of all noble workmen: to im- 
prove the best, break the known barriers of rule, and 
master a new province for Art. These two reasons con- 
verge to explain not only why Shakespeare, having written 
Othello, went on to write Pericles, but also (though 
it be a minor matter) why Pericles took the town as 
it did. 

(2) 
For, obviously, it was a new thing, or an attempt at a 
new thing ; an attempt, by boldly casting over all unity of 
time, to present in terms of drama what naturally belongs 
to epic or romance. Let me insist on this, for it is of 
capital importance. In Pericles our workman Shake- 
speare boldly lays hand on a theme proper to epic or the 
romantic novel — a theme which had already done duty 
in both (in the Confessio Amantis and in a novel by one 
Laurence Twine, entitled The Patterne of Painefull Ad- 



« PERICLES " AND " KING HENRY VIII " 219 

ventures: Containing the most Excellent Pleasant and 
Variable Historie of the Strange Accidents that Befell 
unto Prince Apollonius, the Lady Lucina his Wife, and 
Tharsia his Daughter) — and displays in dramatic form a 
long, diffused story, supposed to cover a lifetime. He is 
doing, in fact, precisely what Sir Philip Sidney in a 
pretty mocking passage of the Apologie for Poetrie 
laughed at bad playwrights for doing: 

Now of time they are much more liberall. For ordinary it is that 
two young Princes fall in love. After many traverces she is got with 
child, delivered of a faire boy, he is lost, groweth a man, falls in 
love, and is ready to get another child, and all this in two hours 
space; which how absurd it is in sence, even sence may imagine, and 
Arte hath taught, and all ancient examples justified. 

So, after all, Shakespeare's was nothing new as an at- 
tempt. What he achieved was to make a success of the 
absurdity, and a success that encouraged him to improve 
on it in Cymheline and The Winter's Tale; for these also 
are long-drawn romances turned into drama ; by more 
cunning machinery, indeed, but unmistakably bearing the 
same stigmata as Pericles — the stigmata of the epical 
romantic tale, not of the drama. 

The time supposed to be occupied by the action of Per- 
icles is about sixteen years. The Winter's Tale has an 
interval of sixteen years between its third and fourth 
acts, with various minor intervals of days and weeks. The 
chronology of Cyrribeline is baffling and in places absurd 
(the speed, for example, of lachimo's coming and going 
between Italy and Britain cannot be reconciled with any 
means of human locomotion known to Shakespeare. He 
could hardly have achieved it on a motor-cycle, with a 



220 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

steamer ready and waiting at Calais). But actually, as 
any intelligent reader must perceive, the author is feeling 
back toward unity of time. We do not see the king's 
sons stolen, and anon, through this and that device, watch 
them grow up — as we see the infants, Marina and Perdita, 
cast away, and are supposed to watch or imagine them 
growing up. We come upon Polydore and Cadwall ready- 
grown, and have it rehearsed to us how that they are the 
lost princes, Guiderius and Arviragus. Yet the supposed 
action of Cymhel'ine must cover many months. N^ow, the 
supposed action of The Tempest — the whole of it — covers 
but three or four hours at the most; and the actual per- 
formance takes almost three. 

And so, after advancing such excellent reasons why 
Shakespeare wrote Pericles at such and such a date, and 
why he made it such and such a play, let me proceed to 
show that he did nothing of the sort. 

(3) 

I will not go so far as to say that Shakespeare could not, 
at any time of his life, have written the first two Acts. 
He was great but careless. I believe, indeed, that he 
touched them up, the odious opening Scene more particu- 
larly. Even in the rhyming lines I should be sorry to 
deny the Master in two or three passages. For example: 

See where she comes, apparell'd like the spring, 
Graces her subjects, and her thoughts the king 
Of every virtue gives renown to men! 



Or: 



Yet sometimes famous princes, like thyself. 
Drawn by report, adventurous by desire. 



« PERICLES " AND " KING HENRY VIII » 221 

Tell thee, with speechless tongues and semblance pale. 
That without covering, save yon field of stars, 
Here they stand martyrs, slain in Cupid's wars. 

Those last four words make me hesitate. But I will swear 
that if (as I profoundly disbelieve) he wrote these two 
Acts at any time of his life, he did not do so within a 
dozen years of his writing the rest of the play. 

The scope of this inquiry confines me to such evidence 
as may be found in Shakespeare's workmanship. I pass 
over evidence of other kinds — evidence marshalled by 
Delius, rieay, and others — which seems to me conclusive. 
I pass over some slight evidences that a man called Wil- 
kins wrote the earlier part of the play. I care not who he 
was, so long as he was not Shakespeare. My only business 
is to suppeditate, by examining the workmanship, a con- 
clusion already based on stronger evidence. Evidence on 
any point of doubt concerning Shakespeare may be ex- 
ternal or internal, may be derived from records, from al- 
lusions to the text, from verse-tests, from half-a-dozen 
studies other than the neglected one — of principles of 
workmanship — ^which I am here trying to pursue. Some- 
times the witness of one sort will preponderate, sometimes 
that of another: and just here I am cheerfully playing 
second fiddle. 

Now, that Shakespeare wag trying, in Pencles and its 
successors, to convert epic into terms of drama, is no war- 
rant for inferring that he who had written Othello was, 
even in waywardness, so little of an artist as to be incap- 
able of telling a story. 

Yet in Pericles, as we have it, that is just what he could 
not do. Some two hundred years later, Mary Lamb, hav- 



k 



222 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

ing to write out the story of Pericles for young people, 
started thus: 

Pericles, Prince of Tyre, became a voluntary exile from his do- 
minions, to avert the dreadful calamities which Antiochus, the wicked 
emperor of Greece, threatened to bring upon his subjects and city of 
Tyre, in revenge for a discovery which the prince had made of a 
shocking deed which the emperor had done in secret; as commonly 
it proves dangerous to pry into the hidden crimes of great men. 

Thus in one sentence — the last clause mere comment — 
Mary Lamb dismisses the whole of the first Act! The 
second Act she treats a little more tenderly, bestowing on 
it a full paragraph, of four sentences. In her whole nar- 
rative, which — even though, as a tale for the young reader, 
it omits all the coarse business at Mitylene — covers some 
twenty-one pages, Acts iii, iv, and v occupy more than 
twenty pages; Acts i and ii less than one. 

What does this mean ? It means that a great deal more 
than a third of the play (in fact, it is nearer a half) — a 
solid block of writing, and that at the beginning, or just 
where in ninety-nine dramas out of a hundred you find 
the board laid, the game planned, and those opening moves 
developed which give the trend toward the climax — it 
means that all this has scarce anything to do with the 
story, and no necessary bearing on it whatever ! 

I have granted that Pericles is what Aristotle would 
call an "epeisodic" play. "I call," says Aristotle, "a 
plot ' epeisodic,' in which the episodes or acts succeed one 
another without probable or necessary sequence. Bad 
poets compose such pieces by their own fault; good poets 
to please the players." I go farther and grant that Aris- 
totle is right when he says in the Poetics (ix, 10), " Of 



« PERICLES " AND " KING HENRY VHI " 223 

all plots and actions the epeisodic are the worst," and 
again, in the Metaphysics, " iN'or does [Nature seem to 
make episodes out of her happenings, like a vile tragedy." 
Still, it remains inconceivable to me that Shakespeare, be- 
ing the master he had made himself, should in these later 
years be guilty of such a blunder. It would mean, not 
that he is incompetent, but that, being competent, he 
is wantonly practising incompetency. As the American 
said, contemplating a certain leader of the English Bar, 
" A stutter may be an affliction, and a hare-lip an act of 
God, but side-whiskers are a man's own fault." 

IN'or is it any answer to say that all the nasty business 
of Antiochus and his daughter lay at hand ready-made 
in the pages of Gower and of Twine's novel. To be sure 
it did. But what of that? Shakespeare did not huddle 
into Macbeth or into Cymbeline everything he found in 
Holinshed, or into Antony and Cleopatra everything he 
found in ISTorth's Plutarch. In selecting what is essential, 
in casting out what is irrelevant or cumbersome, lies one 
half of a great artist's secret. So what I adduce is artistic 
evidence that Shakespeare (or at any rate the later Shake- 
speare, with whom alone we here concern ourselves) did 
not write Acts i and ii of Pericles, as we have it. Yet such 
evidence is almost superfluous, since all the verse-tests put 
the question quite out of doubt. Rhymed endings swarm 
throughout these two Acts. There are 171 lines in the 
very first Scene, and 46 of them rhyme. So, or almost so, 
it goes on until Act iii opens, with Pericles on shipboard; 
and just there, where the true story opens, the rhymes 
suddenly cease. Save as a tag to close an Act there are 
scarcely another six rhymes (outside of the prologue and 



224 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

the silly " vision ") in the whole of the play. The dic- 
tion, the phrasing, moreover, turn suddenly into right 
Shakespeare. Let us listen to Pericles as he questions 
Marina : 

Prithee, speak: 
Falseness cannot come from theej for thou look'st 
Modest as Justice, and thou seem'st a palace 
For the crown'd Truth to dwell in . . . 

Tell thy story: 
If thine consider'd prove the thousandth part 
Of my endurance, thou art a man, and I 
Have suffer'd like a girl. Yet thou dost look 
Like Patience gazing on kings' graves and smiling 
Extremity out of act. 

Can any one doubt the authentic voice there? 

(4) 
So Delius and Fleay and Sir Sidney Lee and Dr. Gol- 
lancz are undoubtedly right in ruling out Acts i and ii as 
un-Shakespearean, or at least not Shakespearean of this 
period. But I hold some of them to be as undoubtedly 
mistaken in ruling out the brothel scenes (Act iv. Scenes 
2, 5, and 6) as un-Shakespearean. I will swear that 
Shakespeare vn-ote them. For the reader's consent, I will 
ask him to read over these scenes side by side with the 
correspondent ones in Measure for Measure, and then 
dare to deny that both are by the same hand. Next, 
I refer him to a paragraph (equal truth and wisdom not 
to be bettered) from our modern Sir Walter Raleigh: 

Measure for Measure and the fourth Act of Pericles (which no 
pen but his could have written) prove Shakespeare's acquaintance 
with the darker side of the town, as it might be seen in Pickt-hatch 
or the Bankside. He does not fear to expose the purest of his 



« PERICLES " AND " KING HENRY VIII " 225 

heroines to the breath of this infection: their virtue is not igno- 
rance; "'tis in grain: 'twill endure wind and weather." In nothing 
is he more himself than in the little care he takes to provide shelter 
for the most delicate characters of English fiction. They owe their 
education to the larger world, not to the drawing-room. Even 
Miranda, who is more tenderly guarded than Isabella or Marina, 
is not the pretty simpleton that some later renderings have made 
of her: when Prospero speaks of the usurping Duke as being no 
true brother to him, she replies composedly: 

" I should sin 
To think but nobly of my grandmother. 
Good wombs have borne bad sons." 

Shakespeare's heroines are open-eyed; therein resembling him- 
self, who turned away from nothing that bears the human image. 

^o: the very greatest artists are not afraid of ugli- 
ness; since only by understanding, by trenching the mire 
of our nature, can the beauty that springs from it be 
shown in highest triumph. Spenser wrote exquisitely; 
nor is Una's chastity a cloistered, though it be a fugitive, 
virtue. But how thin is her purity, how but a figment 
I of allegory her innocence, compared with the courageous 
J virgin chastity of Marina at bay in the house of hell, or 
with the fierce wifely chastity of Imogen! 

There was (as we know) in the Middle Ages an extreme 
sentence of law, under which a woman might vindicate 
the jewel of her reputation by walking over red-hot 
plough-shares. Even such an ordeal is braved — and trod- 
den without flinching — by Marina and Imogen. 

But there is yet another and thoroughly artistic reason 
why Marina should suffer these things. Her mother, 
Thaisa, is to appear in the final Act as the lost wife re- 
stored after many years — a favourite device of Shake- 
speare's, first tried in the Comedy of Errors, repeated in 



226 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Much Ado About Nothing, again here in Pericles, once 
again in The Winters Tale. But let us distinguish: 
the Comedy of Errors is comedy, or rather, broad 
farce. In Much Ado and The Winter's Tale the 
hidden Hero and Hermione have both been cruelly 
wronged; and their revelation at the shrine abases 
the souls of the men v^ho suspected them. Thaisa, risen 
from the grave, has no such reproach wherewith to con- 
front Pericles, by whom she had been wronged by no 
single deed, but loved in life and cherished in memory. 
Therefore, it mv^t be upon the daughter Marina — as it 
needs not be with the daughter Perdita — that you charge 
the audience's sense of affliction vanquished, of port at- 
tained after tempest endured. 

In fact, we must understand what Marina had endured 
in Mitylene before we can express the full beauty of the 
recognition scene in Pericles, It has not — no need to 
say — the terribly beautiful grip of that scene in Lear 
where Cordelia is reconciled with her father: because, to 
begin with, Pericles has been no agent of Marina's suffer- 
ing, as Lear has been the prime agent of Cordelia's ; and 
secondly, there is nothing in Pericles himself to beat his 
soul down as Lear's — nothing to justify the lovely broken 
anguish of — 

Cordelia. O! look upon me, sir, 

And hold your hands in benediction o'er me. 
No, sir, you must not kneel. 

Lear. Pray do not mock me: 

I am a very foolish fond old man, 
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less; 
And, to deal plainly, 
I fear I am not in my perfect mind. 
... Do not laugh at me; 



« PERICLES " AND " KING HENRY VIII " 227 

For, as I am a man, I think this lady 
To be my child Cordelia. 

Cordelia. And bo I am, I am. 

Lear. Be your tears wet? Yes, faith. I pray, weep not: 
If you have poison for me, I will drink it. 
I know you do not love me; for your sisters 
Have, as I do remember, done me wrong: 
You have some cause; they have not. 

Cordelia. No cause, no cause! 

Pathos to rival that no workman can write into Pericles, 
for the simple reason that it is not in the story, which 
holds no anguish comparable for a source of tears. Never- 
theless the recognition scene in Pericles has a delicate 
beauty of its own: and the more we study that beauty 
the better we understand how it depends on Marina's 
having endured the worst of the world as an orphan; 
on the much it means to her to find a father; as we see 
how much more thereby, in the last Act, is summed up 
in her cry of discovery, as she runs and kneels to Thaisa : 

My heart 
Leaps to be gone into my mother's bosom! 

(5) 

I shall conclude this chapter with a very few words upon 
another play, King Henry VIII, which I set beside 
^Pericles not as coming next to it in date (for it certainly 
does not) but because, like Pericles — and by even more 
general consent — it is allowed to be in great part the 
work of other hands than Shakespeare's. And I shall 
\ here dismiss it briefly because it is a Historical Play, 
and, as such, belongs to a genus of its own, and has an 
artistic intention quite apart from that of the Comedies 
or of the Tragedies, or of the romantic tragi-comedies 



228 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

with which we are here concerned; relying on different 
dramatic effects, and obeying therefore different rules of 
workmanship. I will only ask the reader here and on this 
point to bear always in mind that Shakespeare wrote to 
be acted: that very often a scene or a whole play of his 
over which we doubt in our library convinces us and vin- 
dicates itself when performed on the stage (as a captive 
fish, that lies dull and half dead in the hand, will, if re- 
stored to its element, revive, sport and flaunt again in 
its own lovely colours) ; and that, though on the stage 
to-day it disappoint us, the reason may yet be that the 
producers have mistakenly over-dramatised or over-sophis- 
ticated it, and so have missed the proper simplicity of the 
genus. 

I think a historical play should usually be taken much 
as we take a procession in tapestry ; should be treated on 
the flat, so to speak; that, without troubling our minds 
about dramatic concentration and high reliefs, we should 
allow the picture to unroll itself and trust the audience 
not to be offended by abrupt intervals or inconsequences. 
I think, in fact, that some of us who a few years ago were 
helping in various historical " pageants," did by our ex- 
periments — foolish as they often were — ^learn something 
of the right way with these historical plays, though it 
were only to trust an audience to take much for granted 
cheerfully. Eor a certainty we learned something, and 
had a sense that, by unlearning much more, we were 
harking back towards the secret. 

But I have a better reason for speaking briefly of 
Henry VIII. It is that, after time spent on comparing 
theories of Shakespeare's share in it, Fletcher's share, 



« PERICLES » AND " KING HENRY VIII » 229 

others* share, the problem of separating its authorship re- 
mains insoluble to me. I do not yet know, and shall not 
attempt to tell. 

One or two points, however, may be established. 

(1) The main business of Katharine is indisputable 
Shakespeare. We have only to compare her trial scene 
with Hermione's in The Winter's Tale to convince our- 
selves. And, as Dr. Johnson noted, " the genius of 
Shakespeare comes in and goes out with Katharine." 

(2) Katharine's " vision " should not, being beauti- 
ful, have its beauty taken for evidence that Shakespeare 
invented it. Most of the visions in his later plays are 
so rankly bad that to a just mind any excellence in it 
ought to point the other way. (Yet my private opinion 
is that Shakespeare did invent it: because it belongs to 
the business of Katharine, which is his, and because the 
apparitions do not open their mouths.) 

(6) 

If we insist on judging Henry Till as a drama (set- 
ting aside for the moment all questions of mixed author- 
ship) its workmanship has perhaps no one capital flaw 
to compare with that of Pericles; but it misses its pur- 
pose no less fatally. Pericles consumes two Acts in get- 
ting at nothing at all, and starts afresh. King Henry 
Till, after starting with a promise in the Prologue to 
make us weep over the spectacle of high things brought 
low, — 

And if you can be merry then, I'll say 
A man may weep upon his wedding day. 



230 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

starts upon Buckingham, works his fate to a climax, drops 
it, starts upon Katharine, works hers to a climax, drops 
it, starts upon Wolsey, works his to a climax, drops it, 
and winds up with a merry christening. The first four 
Acts might pass as a serious experiment in connecting 
episodes to form a drama. But the fifth mars all, mak- 
ing all incongruous, dismissing us from the house of 
mourning with a poke in the ribs and a slap on the face. 
There is a unity which ranks ahove the famous unities 
of action, time, and place. It is a moral unity; which 
Aristotle forget to mention for the simple reason that he 
could not conceive of a Greek writer offending against it. 
But the authors of Henry VIII do so offend — ^that is, if 
we insist on taking it as a drama, not as a pageant. For 
my own belief, Shakespeare had nothing to do with the 
last Act, in which the artistic offence is found. 

For the other flaw — ^that of the three climaxes — my 
own belief again is that Shakespeare was experimenting 
with the historical play much as he had experimented in 
Pericles, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline: that he saw, or 
thought he saw, a way to draw out drama over a long 
period of time and took for his theme the transitoriness 
of human ambition — which, when we come to think of it, 
can scarcely be better illustrated than by a procession 
of men and women, each rising on another's misfortune, 
each in turn abased, and humiliated in the dust. 

Think ye see 
The very persons of our noble story 
As they were living; think you see them great. 
And follow'd with the general throng and sweat 
Of thousand friends ; then, in a moment, see 
How soon this mightiness meets misery. 



« PERICLES " AND " KING HENRY VIII " 231 

The date of King Henry VIII (or, to be accurate, of its 
production) is unfortunately pretty certain. As we know, 
one of its earliest performances set the Globe Theatre on 
fire. That is the kind of artistic event which gets itself 
precisely recorded in letters and diaries: and this one 
did. It happened on June 29th, 1613. 

I say that the date is " unfortunately pretty certain " 
— " unfortunately," because it fixes the produ'ction of 
Henry VIII a little after that of The Tempest; and the 
most of us would like to think of The Tempest as the final 
triumph upon which Prospero snapped his wand and 
buried his book. But, after all. King Henry VIII is 
anybody's child : while all of The Tempest is right Shake- 
speare. Let us " make it so," as good mariners say, after 
observing the heavens. 



CHAPTER XIII 
CYMBELINE 

Johnson on the plot of Cymbeline — Imperfect sympathies — Truth 
of imagination, of emotion, and of fact — A critical disability — 
Shakespeare's magic — His work conditioned by the Elizabethan stage 
— The theme of Cymbeline — ^The glory of Imogen — Imaginary letter 
from Shakespeare to Johnson — Echoes in Cymheline — The whole 
greater than the parts — Complexity of the plot. 

(1) 

At the close of his commentary on Cymbeline Dr. John- 
son thus dismisses the company : 

This play has many just sentiments, some natural dialogues, 
and some pleasing scenes, but they are obtained at the expense of 
much incongruity. To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity 
of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different 
times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were 
to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too 
evident for detection and too gross for aggravation. 

'Now if this be the last word upon Cymheline, or even 
if it be rather more true than false, we may close our ac- 
count with the play. But (though I should tremble to 
utter it in the presence of his ghost, and for more than 
one reason) I confess that to me the Doctor's unfaltering 
pronouncement tells little, and in a fashion not unlike 
that of the four Caledonians who, being at a party when 
a son of Burns was expected, and hearing Charles Lamb 
Bay that he wished it were the father instead of the son, 
started up at once to inform him that " that was impos- 

233 



CYMBELINE 233 

sible, because he was dead." The essay in which Lamb 
tells this simple anecdote is headed " Imperfect Sym- 
pathies." I ask my readers to fix that term in their 
minds for a moment, while I attempt to establish and 
illustrate a principle of criticism, lacking which we shall 
be at a loss to understand, as a fortiori to enjoy, a vast 
deal of good literature, and this Tragedie of Cymheline 
in especial. 

There is a truth of imagination; there is a truth of 
emotion also; as well as a truth of fact. The first two 
are often found united, and all three not seldom. Yet 
all three are distinct; and he alone can be a critic of the 
first order who by fortunate gift of birth, or of train- 
ing, has a sense responsive to all three indifferently, 
whether he catch them together or apart. 

Let me give an illustration or two, and begin with 
one almost childish: 

Once upon a time there lived a man immensely rich, who pos- 
sessed town-houses and country-houses, retinues of servants, chariots, 
horses in stable — everything apparently, in short, that the heart 
could desire. But all this was marred by his beard, a bright blue in 
colour, at sight of which every woman felt a desire to scream. 

Now this, of course, is untruthful to fact; historically 
unsound because lacking name, date, and evidence ; scien- 
tifically (one would say) impossible ; and, on top of this, 
offensive to credulity as soon as we reflect that a man so 
rich had money enough to dye his beard, if scruples of 
caste or religion forbade his buying a razor. But, the 
imaginative truth once granted (as childhood grants it 
with scarcely an effort), the rest of the story of Blue- 
heard at once becomes real. All of us, in our day, have 



234 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

felt the agony of Fatima as she calls up the stairway to 
the tower, " Sister Anne ! Sister Anne, do you see any 
one coming ? " 

For another illustration, let me adduce one of the love- 
liest, most familiar stanzas in our poetry: 

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! 

No hungry generations tread thee down; 
The voice I heard this passing hour was heard 

In ancient days of emperor and clown: 
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path 

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, 
She stood in tears, amid the alien corn; 
The same that oft-times hath 
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 

Upon that, which all catholic taste admits to express 
the all but inexpressible heart of loveliness. Sir Sidney 
Colvin remarks: 

In this joy he [Keats] remembers how often the thought of 
death had seemed welcome to him, and thinks it would be more wel- 
come now than ever. The nightingale would not cease her song — 
and here, by a breach of logic which is also, I think, a flaw in the 
poetry, he contrasts the transitoriness of human life, meaning the 
life of the individual, with the permanence of the song-bird's life, 
meaning the life of the type. 

In other words, nightingales (when you choose to think 
of it) have even shorter lives than men. True, in fact — 
in fact profoundly true ! To what nonsense, viewed thus, 
it reduces Callimachus' famous lines, thus rendered by 
Cory: 

"They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead; 
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed. 
I wept as I remembered how often you and I 
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky. 



CYMBELINE 235 

"And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest, 
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago, at rest, 
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales awake; 
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take." 

Death can and in fact does, of course, claim nightingales 
as well as men. Yet was Victor Hugo talking like a 
fool when he wrote " The flowers, the flowers last 
always"? Hugo, Callimachus, Keats are all uttering 
a truth outside mere truth of fact: the same truth that 
Wordsworth utters more didactically in his farewell to 
the Eiver Duddon. — 

I thought of thee, my partner and my guide. 

As being pass'd away. — Vain sympathies! 

For backward, Duddon! as I cast my eyes, 
I see what was, and is, and will abide. 
Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide; 

The Form remains, the Function never dies; 

While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise, 
We Men, who in our morn of youth defied 
The elements, must vanish. . . . 

" The function never dies." The nightingale lifts the 
same chant in this passing hour as 

was heard 
In ancient days of emperor and clown, 

and found a path through the sad heart of Ruth. The 
nightingale, dying, transmits the invariable secret. We, 
restless men, exhaust ourselves individually with " the 
weariness, the fever, and the fret," and individually pass 
to dust. The nightingale sings on. — That, I submit, is 
a " truth of emotion." 

But let us take any poetry. If we press the Odyssey, 



236 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Paradise Lost, even The Ring and the Book, as if we 
press Bluebeard, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood — 
they are almost always true to imagination, usually to 
emotion, seldom to fact. Circe in fact no more turned 
the companions of Odysseus into swine than Cinderella's 
godmother turned the pumpkin into a gilt coach; Satan 
never addressed that speech of his to the fiends in coun- 
cil: at any rate there were no reporters present. And 
likely enough Mammon followed Belial with a plain 
" Hear, hear " ; content, like many another eminent finan- 
cier, to let a clever youngster do his sophistry for him. 
'Naj, if we take The Faerie Queene or The Pilgrim's 
Progress, or any great allegory, ancient or modern, what 
have we but a naked, deliberate, and successful attempt 
to inculcate truth by narrating that which never hap- 
pened and never could happen? From the allegorist, de- 
liberately didactic, let us pass to the lyrical poet in his 
ecstasy of love; take Ben Jonson's — 

See the Chariot at hand here of Love, 

Wherein my Lady rideth! 
Each that draws is a swan or a dove. 

And well the car Love guideth. 
As she goes, all hearts do duty 

Unto her beauty, 
And enamour'd do wish, so they might 

But enjoy such a sight, 
That they still were to run by her side 

Thro' swords, thro' seas, whither she would ride. 



Or Donne's- 



As 'twixt two equal Armies, Fate 

Suspends uncertain victory, 
Our souls — which to advance their state 

.Were gone out — hung 'twixt her and me: 



f 



CYMBELINE 237 

And while our souls negotiate there, 

We like sepulchral statues lay. 
All day the same our postures were, 

And we said nothing, all the day. 



Or let U8 take Browning: 



This is a spray the bird clung to. 
Making it blossom with pleasure 



Or Tennyson: 



The red rose cries, " She is near, she is near " ; 
And the white rose weeps, "She is late ..." 

(pathetic fallacy) 

She is coming, my own, my sweet; 

Were it ever so airy a tread, 
My heart would hear her and beat 

Were it earth in an earthy bed; 
My dust would hear her and beat 

Had I lain for a century dead; 
Would start and tremble under her feet. 

And bloesom in purple and red. 

But it wouldn't, we know, any more than a spray blos- 
soms with pleasure because a bird clings to it. The 
causation is quite unscientific. No, the truth in these 
passages is a truth of emotion coloured by imagination, 
or of imagination coloured by emotion. 

I borrow that term " Imperfect Sympathies " from 
Charles Lamb, because it exactly expresses a disability 
which, in whatever degree it afflicts any one of us, he 
should use all pains to overcome: and I lay stress on it 
because our enjoyment and understanding of this particu- 
lar play Cymheline depend so crucially upon adapting, 



238 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

even surrendering, our sympathy to it. In what follows 
I shall not repeat a number of things which are easily 
found in the text-books. If, taking it from the point of 
view chosen for these papers, I can persuade the reader 
to surrender his sympathies — or to surrender them a 
little more — with what Wordsworth calls " a wise passive- 
ness " to the exquisite story of Imogen, it will be help- 
ing towards the best I can wish for him. 

(2) 

When we label the latest group of Shakespeare's plays 
by the epithet " romantic," we attribute to them a com- 
mon something with which (as few will deny) Dr. John- 
son had an imperfect sympathy. He was a great man, a 
masculine critic: but the Woods of Westermain were not 
his province. He was also a highly courageous man, and 
the dark menace of those thickets would have no terror 
for him. — - 

But should you distrust a tone, 

Then beware. 
Shudder all the haunted roods. 
All the eyeballs under hoods 

Shroud you in their glare. 
Enter these enchanted woods, 

You who dare! 

Samuel Johnson would have dared, fast enough. He 
would also have distrusted, and profoundly, not " a tone," 
but almost every tone — ^the whole tone, in fact, of the 
performance. As for the eyeballs under hoods and the 
rest: 

Thousand eyeballs under hoods 
Have you by the hair. 



CYMBELINE 239 

Ko! nor even by his wig! — He would just have said 
" Shoo ! ", gripped his walking-stick, and held on his way. 

That, it may be urged, " is an argument ad hominem " 
or (since we have mentioned the walking-stick) " ad 
Toaculum," ; and, I may be told, it is all very well to say 
that Johnson suffered from imperfect sympathy, or, as 
he would have phrased it, " a stark insensibility," but we 
have not yet answered his indictment. Well, to be sure 
it is a damning one, though all the counts are not equally 
formidable. If we admit it, very little is left to be said 
concerning the workmanship of Cymheline. 

And yet I am not so sure! I have a suspicion — a 
faint hope. If the indictment be true, and nevertheless 
I can ignore it and read Cymhelme with delight, then 
either I am a very great fool (a point I reserve) or 
Shakespeare is a magical workman so to charm me into 
forgetting faults so flagrant. 

However he works his charm, it is not by hiding bad 
anatomy with an overlay of beautiful language. Though 
Cymheline contains many exquisite lines, and more than 
one exquisite passage, (notably, of course, the description 
of Imogen's bedchamber) , its style on the whole is broken 
and difficult. It opens with a sentence that set every 
early editor emending until Johnson himself delivered the 
bewildered student thus : — " I am now to tell my opinion, 
which is, that the lines stand as they were originally 
written." Professor Barrett Wendell quotes a hasty 
critic who said that Cymheline sounds as if Browning 
had written it: and he instances, to illustrate the broken 
music of the play, the passage where Imogen receives 
Posthumus' letter bidding her meet him at Milford. — 



240 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

0, for a horse with wings! Hear'st thou, Pisanio? 
He is at Milford Haven: read, and tell me 
How far 'tis thither. If one of mean affairs 
May plod it in a week, why may not I 
Glide thither in a day? Then, true Pisanio, 
Who long'st like me to see thy lord; who long'st— 
O! let me bate, — but not like me — ^yet long'st. 
But in a fainter kind; 0! not like me, 
For mine's beyond beyond: say, and speak thick 
(Love's counsellor should fill the bores of hearing 
To the smothering of the sense), how far it is 
To this same blessfed Milford. 

" Here," says the Professor, " the actual sentence is only 
* Pisanio . . . say . . . how far it is to . . . Mil- 
ford ? ' " True, and the beauty of the passage owes little 
to felicities or flowers of diction. But must we not see 
how beautiful it is dramatically — that is, in workman- 
ship ? Kote it to the last detail — the irony of that " true 
Pisanio," addressed to the man even then weighing how 
he can kill her ; the irony of " this same blessed Milford," 
place appointed for her slaughter — she (" the elected 
deer") crying for a horse with wings, to get the faster 
thither! 

But this is fine workmanship on detail, which John- 
son allows. " This play has many just sentiments, some 
natural dialogues, and some pleasing scenes." His in- 
dictment is concerned rather with the general structure 
of the story, the " folly of the fiction." 

Well, let us take that. I said just now that his sep- 
arate counts are not equally impressive: and, for my 
part, I attach very little importance to what he calls " the 
confusion of the names and manners of different times." 
Shakespeare, as I must keep repeating in these papers, 
wrote for an audience in the Globe Theatre. He 



CYMBELINE ' 241 

did not write for Dr. Jolinsoii. He wrote for a 
stage which had little scenery or none; and for ac- 
tors who — as we may convince ourselves by glancing over 
the wardrobe lists preserved to us — had a limited stock 
of handsome, expensive dresses. Were some actor-mana- 
ger in these days to spend time and money in conscien- 
tiously reproducing the scenery and costumes of Britain 
I in the actual Cymbeline's time, and then more time and 
money in conscientiously reproducing the Renaissance 
^ scenery and costumes which befit lachimo — were he to 
build up Imogen's bedchamber in a " constated " British 
^ palace of the age when our ancestors had but recently 
. desisted from running about in woad (if indeed a few con- 
, servative country squires did not actually persist in it), 
what would he achieve ? He would, by emphasising every 
^ absurdity to which Shakespeare was lordlily indifferent, 
make his production the more and the more unlike that 
which, for the Globe stage, Shakespeare intended. The 
setting of Cyrribeline, though nominally it belongs to 
Ancient Britain, and Milford Haven carries a homely, 
familiar sound, has no more actuality of date or place 
than Puss-in-Boots. If any age has a claim on it, we 
should choose the Renaissance ; because amid so much that 
is generally true of all time, lachimo's villainy has the 
peculiar smack of Renaissance Italy, and the plot comes 
out of Boccaccio — which, as seamen say, is " nigh 
enough " — at any rate, is Italian. (I am aware that the 
plot is alleged to be found also in a work entitled West- 
ward for Smelts, alleged to repose in the Ashmolean 
Library at Oxford.) 



242 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

(3) 

The gravamen of Johnson's charge lies in the words 
" at the expense of much incongruity. To remark . . . 
the impossibility of the events in any system of life were 
to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility." For a 
story, however far removed from truth of life, must be 
congruous in itself, congruous with truth of imagination. 
Even Puss-in-Boots is that. You cannot build artistically 
upon that which is merely freakish, inconsecutive. You 
put a certain character upon each person, and to that he 
must somehow or other be faithful. It is the very first 
rule laid down in the Ars Poetica. — 

Risum teneatis, amici — 
Humano eapiti cervicem pictor equinam 
Jungere si velit et varias inducere plumas 
Undique collatis membris. . . . 

Well, I cannot see that in aught essential Cymheline vio- 
lates this primary rule. The theme of the play is the 
vindication of Imogen after wrong endured. And here, 
as the secret of defence lies often in counter-attack, I 
turn on Dr. Johnson and demand, " Sir, in your prelim- 
inary compliments you are good enough to admit that 
' this play contains many just sentiments, some natural 
dialogues, and some pleasing scenes ' ; but why do you 
not include mention of the marvellous portrayal of 
Imogen? Over the martyrdom of Desdemona you could, 
in Heine's words, ' froth like a pot of porter.' How then 
comes this preoccupation with ' some just sentiments,' 
* some pleasing scenes,' and this blindness to Imogen ? " 
For Imogen is the be-all and end-all of the play. She 



CYMBELINE 243 

has all the wrongs of Desdemona, plus the serene cour- 
age to conquer them and forgive. She has all the fond 
trust of Desdemona, with all the steel and wit which Des- 
demona fatally lacks. Eange out the great gallery of 
good women — Silvia, Portia, Beatrice, Eosalind, Viola, 
Helena, Isabella, Marina, Perdita, Miranda — Heavens, 
what a list ! — and over all of them Imogen bears the bell. 

I shall not descant upon Imogen. I might on my own 
preference substitute ' Miranda ' for ' Perdita ' in the 
following sentence of Swinburne's: but to every other 
word of it I subscribe with my heart. " Though Perdita 
may be the sweetest of all imaginable maidens, Imogen 
is the most adorable woman ever created by God or man." 
Hear her when lachimo has spun his false tale of her 
husband's infidelity among chance Italian courtesans and 
counsels her " Be revenged." Hear the perfect dignity 
of love in innocence. — 

Reveng'd? 
How should I be reveng'd? If this be true, — 
As I have such a heart that both mine ears 
Must not in haste abuse — if this be true, 
How should I be reveng'd? 

Let the reader take these lines slowly with pause and 
pause between word and word, and it is odds if he can 
hold his tears for their very beauty. Hear her again, 
when Pisanio hesitates to kill her, and she, heart-broken, 
pleads to be killed. 

Pisanio. No, on my life. 

I'll give but notice you are dead and send him 
Some bloody sign of it: for 'tis commanded 
I should do so. You shall be miss'd at court. 
And that will well confirm it. 



244 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Imogen. Why, good fellow, 

"y^hat shall I do the while? Where hide? how Uoef 
Or in my life what comfort, when I am 
Dead to my husband? 

Hear her lastly when — ^But I will reserve this lastly for 
the end of my paper. 

Many have sung the praises of Imogen: and not the 
least eloquent of them is Gervinus, who (with many tribal 
incapacities) brought to the study of Shakespeare a rev- 
erential mind, a noble modesty. Gervinus finds Imogen 
" the most lovely and artless of the female characters 
portrayed by Shakespeare." — 

Her appearance sheds warmth, fragrance, and brightness over 
the whole drama. More true and simple than Portia and Isabella, 
she is even more ideal. In harmonious union she blends external 
grace with moral beauty, and these with straightforwardness of 
feeling and the utmost clearness of understanding. She is the sum 
and aggregate of fair womanhood such as at last the poet con- 
ceived it. We may doubt if in all poetry there be a second creature 
so charmingly depicted with such perfect truth to nature. 

I would add no word to Gervinus' eulogy, save perhaps 
this. — For ' conceived ' I should substitute ' achieved ' — 
" The sum and aggregate of fair womanhood as at last 
Shakespeare achieved it." For when I stand apart from 
their individual spells and study them I can see all his 
previous heroines as parcels in a conception, of which — 
long shaped in his mind — he at last achieved this perfect 
portrait. 

(*)■ 

But here we come back strengthened to deal with 'John- 
son's criticism. 

If we agree with Gervinus ; if we allow Imogen to be 



CYMBELINE 245 

such a woman as that; then Shakespeare has done so 
marvellous a thing — a thing so far above other men's 
compass — that only the folly of inordinate expectation 
can deny it to be the very thing he was trying to do. What 
idleness, then, of presumption, when the man has done 
that almost impossible thing, and has done it supremely, 
to start lecturing him on this or that flaw in the machinery 
he used to accomplish it! If we, acknowledging the re- 
sult, imagine that we can improve upon the means to it, 
then (if I may adapt Donne) — 

Then we have done a braver thing 

Than all the Worthies did: 
And yet a braver thence doth spring— 

Which is, To keep that hid. 

Let us imagine Shakespeare from the Elysian Fields 
acknowledging the arrival of Dr. Johnson's presentation 
copy, more or less in these terms. — 

"The author of The Tragedie of Cyrribelvne presents his compli- 
ments to the author of Irene, a Tragedy, and is in receipt of a com- 
mentary upon the earlier play. The author of CymbeUne, while 
grateful for the information that ' this play has many just senti- 
ments,' etc. — the more grateful because it came as news to him — 
craves leave to observe that these compliments lie somewhat wide 
of the point: that, for his part, he had been inattentive to such 
things, or considered them but as subsidiary to a purpose which 
had long engaged his fancy: that of delineating a lady, wronged 
but forgiving, in whom his audience might recognise, or believe that 
they recognised, the completest of her sex. To effect this in the 
King's daughter, Imogen — who may be recalled as one of the prom- 
inent persons in the drama — he has to confess that he amassed 
many artifices as they came to hand, without considering their 
separate worth. . . . The author of CymbeUne takes this oppor-, 
tunity of complimenting the author of Irene, a Tragedy, whose lit- 
erary activities in other fields than the dramatic, and particularly 



246 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

in classifying the English tongue (licentiously abused by so many), 
he has followed with the liveliest interest. And he begs to remain," 
etc., etc. 

(S) 

How did he do it? I grant that when we start pick- 
ing Cymbeline to pieces, we soon find ourselves puzzled, 
disheartened; as though at stand, in a cathedral of glori- 
ous windows, before an empty one demanding to he glori- 
ous as they, and — for material — at stand before a scrap- 
heap of rejected glass. Cymbeline is Lear, but an inferior 
Lear ; lachimo is lago, but an inferior lago, a professional 
seducer without lago's malignity as without his inward 
excuse. The wicked Queen is the Dionyza of Pericles. 
Posthumus is a weak Othello: Imogen has stepped down 
from her rank to him, as did Desdemona to wed the 
Moor. Here is a square of glass, with a label and a speech 
on it, signed Belarius, lauding the simple life in contrast 
with courts and royalties — good enough, yet not quite so 
good as that on the label in the exiled Duke's mouth 
in As You Like It: 

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile. 
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet 
Than that of painted pomp? . . . 

And here is a song, " Hark, hark, the lark," in its setting 
for all the world like " Who is Sylvia ? " And here is 
Pisanio, the servant commanded to murder his mistress, 
but too merciful to do it, — for all the world like Leonine 
in Pericles or the soft-hearted villain in The Babes in 
the Wood. As for this picture of a faithful lady putting 
on boy's clothes and turning page, have we not been tired 
of it by The Two Gentlemen of Verona and All's Well 



CYMBELINE 247 

That Ends Well, not to dwell on similar masqueradings 
by Portia, Eosalind, Viola ? When the Tales from Shake- 
speare were in progress, Charles Lamb wrote to Words- 
worth, " Mary's just stuck fast in All's Well That Ends 
Well. She complains of having to set forth so many 
female characters in boy's clothes. She begins to think 
that Shakespeare must have wanted — imagination ! " 

Yes, if we will, Cynibeline is constructed out of frag- 
ments, each like something Shakespeare had used before, 
and, if we will, every one inferior. Yet cannot we, if 
we aspire to be critics, get it out of our heads that the 
worth of any detail is separate, to be separately judged? 
Cannot we, even after so many great artists have told us, 
get it into our heads that the ' purple patch ' is an offence, 
that the worth of every detail consists in just so much as 
it contributes — ^no matter how modestly — to the total ef- 
fect? In great art the stone which the builder rejected 
may at any time become the head of the corner. Why 
on earth should it be a reproach against Cymheline that in 
Lear Shakespeare did something better than this, in 
Othello something better than that, when out of the in- 
ferior this and that he has built the incomparable Imogen ? 

(6) 
I hold, then, that Johnson made too much of the incon- 
gruities in Cymheline. As incongruities of fact, where 
they do not assail the eye, they have only to be indicated 
to be admitted : but, if we keep our gaze loyally on Imogen, 
they are overlooked or felt to blend into an imaginative 
congruity that leaves little for censure. My complaint 
rather, as I read the play (I have never seen it on the 



248 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

stage), lies against the complexity of the plot — a tangle 
of intrigues so multiplied that they, more than any incon- 
gruities, divert the mind from Imogen and worry me 
with the question, " How on earth is the man going to 
unravel it all ? " Thus I can well imagine the full effect 
on a spectator to be delayed until the curtain has fallen 
and he is walking away from the theatre: and the great 
masterpieces arc always simpler, more direct, than this. 
ITor is the main thing — Imogen — the only thing that suf- 
fers from this delay. If we are interested in the plot 
itself, we must (as Professor Barrett Wendell has pointed 
out) give it " a preposterous attention." — 

Until the very last scene, the remarkably involved story tangles 
itself in a way which is utterly bewildering. At any given point, 
overwhelmed with a mass of facts presented pell-mell, you are apt 
to find that you have forgotten something important. Coming after 
such confusion, the last scene in Cymbeline is among the most 
notable bits of dramatic construction anywhere. The more one 
studies it the more one is astonished at the ingenuity with which 
denouement follows ddnouement.^ 

In this amazing tour de force, which runs (in the Cam- 
bridge text) to 485 lines. Professor Wendell has counted 
for us no less than twenty-four cumulated denouements! 
The ordinary play has one, perhaps two, rarely so many 
as three. I shall, after referring the reader to his book, 
work out but a portion of the scene on a method which, 
less ample than his, confines itself to the wonderful devel- 
opment of ' recognition ' (dvayvoopifft?) out of ' recog- 
nition.' 

The Scene (Act v, 5) opens with the stage-direction, 

^ William Shakespeare: a Study in Elizabethan Literature. 1894. 
English Edition, p. 358. 



CYMBELINE 249 

Cymheline's tent. Enter Cymheline, Belarms, Guiderius, 
Arviragus, Pisanio, Lords, Officers, and Attendants. 
Kow, of these, — 

(a) Cymbeline does not know who Belarius is; nor 
that Guiderius and Arviragus, whom he knights for 
their prowess in battle, are his o\vn sons. 

(b) Guiderius and Arviragus have no suspicion that 
they are the King's sons, but suppose Belarius to 
be their father. 

(c) Pisanio knows nothing: and the Lords and At- 
tendants are equally in the dark. 

(d) Belarius, who knows all (so far), is still for 
concealing all. 

The two youths are scarcely knighted before (1. 23) 
Enter Cornelius and Ladies, who report that the wicked 
Queen has died in a frenzy of remorse, confessing that 
she had not only tried to murder the King's daughter, 
Imogen, by a swift poison, but attempted the King's own 
life by a lingering one. While Cymbeline, who had loved 
and trusted his wife fondly, staggers under this news, the 
prisoners of war are led in (1. 69). Enter Lucius, 
lachimo, the Soothsayer, and other Roman Prisoners, 
guarded; Posthumus behind, and Imogen — Imogen still 
in boy's disguise. The situation now is — 

(a) Lucius, the captive General, is a polite bystander. 
He knows nothing, but promptly proceeds to beg 
ransom for Imogen, whom he believeg to be a boy in 
his service. 

(b) Cymbeline thinks he must have seen the boy (his 
daughter) before, somewhere; is strangely attracted 
and offers generous pardon. 



250 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

(c) Imogen is recognised as Imogen only by the faith- 
ful servant Pisanio: but — 

(d) Belarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus recognise 
her with stupefaction as the ghost of the boy Fidele — 
the boy whose body Guiderius and Arviragus had, a 
while ago, held in their arms, carrying it to burial. 
They do not recognise Posthumus in his peasant's 
disguise: but — 

(e) Imogen (oh, trust her!) has recognised her hus- 
band. She knows almost everybody on the stage: 
and she shares with Guiderius and Arviragus the 
knowledge that Cloten has been killed: but she 
does not know these two to be her brothers, nor 
is she yet acquainted with the full villainy of 
lachimo. 

(f) Posthumus knows the complementary half of 
lachimo's villainy, and very little beside. 

(g) lachimo knows neither Posthumus nor Imogen. 
He is a villain caught in the dark. 

(h) Cornelius holds the secret of the potion, and 
(i) the Soothsayer knows just about as much as any 
other soothsayer knows. 
To resume — Lucius having begged his page's life, and 
the King having granted not only this but any boon the 
supposed boy may ask, all eyes are naturally bent upon 
Imogen. All present naturally expect the lad to ask, in 
his turn, for his master's life. The noble Lucius himself 
looks for this as a matter of course. Says he, while 
Imogen hesitates — 

I do not bid thee beg my life, good lad, 
And yet I know thou wilt. 



CYMBELINE 251 

She, however, with some seeming lack of heart, will take 
no account of him for the moment — and it cuts him to 
the quick. Even bare gratitude must come second to the 
vindication of her chastity, jewel of her soul. Here with 
the villain lachimo at her mercy — suspecting nothing, 
recognising neither of the victims of his foul practice — 
is a moment too precious for the chance that another mo- 
ment may let slip. She begs the King to step aside and 
give her some private hearing. Cymbeline grants this 
also. 

Ay, with all my heart, 
And lend my best attention. What's thy name? 

" Fidele, sir," answers Imogen : and upon that word 
leaves Belarius, Guiderius, Arviragus to an increased 
amazement. This is the boy then " who died, and was 
Eidele " ! 

She and the King return from their conference. The 
King points a finger at lachimo — " Sir, step you forth " 
— and Imogen, indicating the ring on lachimo's finger, 
demands, as her boon, to know " How came it yours ? " 
lachimo, caught in a trap, confesses his villainy: and his 
confession carries us to 1. 209, until Posthumus, on whom 
the truth has been dawning, breaks in upon the tale and 
reveals himself in an agony of rage and remorse. As 
the first gust spends itself in wild cries, 

Imogen! 
My queen, my life, my wife! O Imogen, 
Imogen, Imogen! 

Imogen herself, unable to bear the anguish of her hus- 
band's anguish, throws herself forward. 

Peace, my lord! hear — hear — 



252 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

He, believing her to be a silly interrupting boy, turns 
fiercely and strikes her to earth. 
At this point, then (1. 229), 

(a) lachimo's confession has been made, to elucidate 
matters. 

(b) Posthumus has declared himself. 

(c) Imogen, her chastity cleared, is yet supposed to 
be dead. She lies on the ground, stunned by this 
last blow from her husband — his last blow and a 
physical one. 

But this is too much for Pisanio, the only person on the 
stage who knows the supposed boy to be the real Imogen. 
He rushes on, lifts her head to his knee, crying — 

O gentlemen, help! 
Mine and your mistress! O, my lord Posthumus! 
You ne'er killed Imogen till now. 

So his story, too, comes out: and his story reveals not 
only that she is the boy Fidele but (with Cornelius sup- 
plementing it) the whole vile complot of the dead Queen 
and how it chanced to be foiled. Therefore, Imogen be- 
ing revealed for Imogen, she anticipates his remorse by 
running to him and holding him in her arms, that only 
fail as his arms conquer them in a stronger clasp. Shake- 
speare wrote many plays more perfect than Cymbeline: 
but he never wrote five lines more exquisitely poignant 
than these: 

Imogen. Why did you throw your wedded lady from you? 

Think that you are upon a lock, and now — 
{emhracing Mm) 

Throw mo again! 
Posthumus. Hang there like fruit, my soul, 

Till the tree die! 



CYMBELINE 253 

We have only yet arrived at line 265; and in the re- 
maining 221 lines of this marvellous Scene there are yet 
some nine or ten complications and denouements left for 
the reader to follow. But on this passage I am satisfied 
to call a halt and claim that Cymbeline has vindicated its 
author. 

" O mighty poet ! " was all that De Quincey could ut- 
ter, arising, stunned from perusal of Macbeth. " O 
mighty poet ! " 

May not we, closing Cymbeline, exclaim, " mighty 
craftsman! "3 



CHAPTER XIV 
THE WINTER'S TALE 

The Winter's Tale — Echoes of Pericles — Fusion of tragedy and 
comedy — Futility of hard definitions — False criticism of its struc- 
ture — The author's aim — ^An honest failure — The jealousy of 
Leontes — Some careless workmanship — The fate of Antigonus — The 
part of Autolycus — The recognition scene — Deliberate faery — Weak- 
nesa of the plot as a whole — The unapproachable love-scene. 

(1) 

Imagine a gallery hung with tapestries and having 
many side-doors to left and right with passages that lead 
into mysterious parts of the house ; or a long garden alley 
out of which by-paths branch and are lost in glooms of 
shade and echoes of lapsing water, faint, unseen, at times 
distant and anon close at hand. At close of day in such 
a place, you will be haunted first by the uncanny feel- 
ing " I have been here — just here — before, either in this 
life or in some previous one," and next by whispers, 
footfalls, shadows that form themselves at the crossways 
ahead and fade down them as soon as surmised. 

So, at the close of Shakespeare's day, are we haunted 
as we follow The Winter's Tale; and by many ghosts, but 
chiefly by the ghost of Pericles, Prince of Tyre. In- 
deed (to speak fancifully a little longer of a play that 
cannot be criticised without fancy), I cannot read these 
two plays in close succession but I am constantly put in 
mind of Coleridge's allegory. Time, Beat and Imaginary, 
to give it a new application: 

254 



THE WINTER'S TALE 255 

On the wide level of a mountain's head 
(I know not where, but 'twas some faery place), 
Their pinions ostrich-like for sails outspread. 
Two lovely children ran an endless race — 

A sister and a brother. 

This far outstripped the other: 
Yet ever runs she with reverted face 

And looks and listens for the boy behind: 

For he, alas, is blind! 
O'er rough and smooth with even step he pass'd. 
And knows not whether he be first or last. 

Like Pericles, The Winter's Tale slips a long interval 
of years between its third and fourth Acts, like Pericles 
employing a chorus to beg our forgiveness for the breach 
made in the sacred Unity of Time. They are yawning 
gaps, too : fourteen years in Pericles, sixteen in The Win- 
ter s Tale. But of course we recognise them to be neces- 
sary as soon as we see what Shakespeare is trying to do ; 
which is, to reconcile the mistakes, wrongs, sufferings 
of one generation of men and women in their hopes for 
the next. " The fathers have eaten sour grapes, but 
through their repentance and under God's mercy the chil- 
dren's teeth shall not be set on edge." That is the recur- 
rent task of our Shakespeare in these his last years, in 
the sun-setting — 

On the wide level of a mountain's head 

(I know not where, but 'twas some faery place) : 

and as yet Shakespeare, master of resources though he 
was, could hit on no device to avoid these gaps, having 
to present, in an action of some three hours, the children 
Marina and Perdita first as babes exposed, helpless as in- 
nocent, to the surge of the sea or the beasts of the forest, 
anon as maidens grown up to reunite parental hearts 



256 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

long astray, redeem inveterate wrongs, cancel old woes, 
heal the past with holy hope. 

(2) 

Critics have accused Pericles and The Winter's Tale 
of this common fault: that each has a double plot which 
is also a separated plot — separated by the break between 
Acts iii and iv. In a previous chapter we have examined 
the double plot of Pericles. In The Winter s Tale, it is 
urged, the first three Acts made a complete independent 
tragedy. By the end of them the boy Mamilius is dead; 
Antigonus is dead; and- — far worse — for aught we know 
Hermione is dead, of a broken heart. The words of 
the Oracle are fulfilled; and Leontes, childless as well as 
wifeless, is very righteously left to a lifelong remorse. 
Thus far Shakespeare has worked strictly in terms of trag- 
edy; and the action, tragically conceived, has been tragi- 
cally rounded off. Then (say the critics) in the last 
two Acts, after a supposed interval, Shakespeare tacks on 
a complete independent comedy, which, picking up the 
thread of the story at its most tragic point, conducts us 
out into a garden of pleasant romantic devices where old 
vn-ongs meet to be reconciled as in this world they never 
do and never are. 

I lay little store by this fault-finding. To start 
with, I think it unfair to drag Pericles into the compari- 
son, since (as we have proved to our satisfaction) the 
first two Acts of Pericles are not Shakespeare's work ; and 
therefore in opposing its last two Acts against its first 
three the critics oppose them against work for two-thirds 
of which he was not responsible; whereas in setting the 



THE WINTER'S TALE 257, 

last two against the first three Acts of The Winter's Tale 
they are dealing with work for which he is wholly respon- 
sible. Here, if faulty workmanship be detected, Shake- 
speare and Shakespeare alone is to blame. 

'Nexty ruling out Pericles for this reason and taking 
The Winter's Tale by itself, I find the fault-finderg 
pedantic. They seem to me to be enslaved by stock defi- 
nitions. " Here," they say, " in Acts i, ii, iii, we have 
Tragedy; there, in Acts iv and v, we have Comedy. 
Therefore Shakespeare is guilty of the attempt to work 
into one drama two different stories in two separate cate- 
gories of Art. Q. E. D." 

Quite so. That is precisely what Shakespeare was 
attempting to do. 

In a world where ITature mixes comedy with tragedy 
and often shades one into the other indistinguishably, 
Art, if she be I»[ature's mirror (as Shakespeare held), 
must always be impatient of hard definitions. They 
have their disciplinary uses : again and again while he is 
learning his trade they may restrain the artist from " mix- 
ing up things that differ " — which Horace rightly put in 
the forefront of his Ars Poetica as the prime offence 
against Art. But in the end they must be for him a mat- 
ter of tact rather than of strict law which de minimis non 
curat. They are, after all, conventions: they are, at the 
best, inductions from the practice of great artists who 
have gone before; as -^schylus, Sophocles, Euripides 
preceded Aristotle, and but for them he would have had 
not only no theory but nothing to theorise about. As he 
goes on, the great artist with a sense of growing power 
conceives a desire to improve the best. At the same time 



258 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

he perceives that in Art, as in Nature, truth is a matter 
too delicate to he grasped by schoohnen. La Verite con- 
siste da/ns les nuances; and, in the division of labour 
between him and the critics, it is his, not theirs, to lead 
the way in discovery. 

Be this granted or not, no one can begin to understand 
Shakespeare's later plays who does not perceive that they 
have one common and constant aim — to repair the pas- 
sionate errors of men and women in the happiness their 
children discover, and so to renew the hopes of the world ; 
to reconcile the tragedy of one generation with the fresh 
hope of another in a third form of drama which we 
may call ' romantic ' if we will. 

Moreover — and for a minor point — it is not true of this 
particular play. The Winter's Tale, that Acts i — iii make 
a rounded play in themselves. A number of threads are 
deliberately left hanging. For example, while the doom 
of the Oracle has been exacted, its promise of hope yet 
waits to be fulfilled — The King shall live without an heir 
if that which is lost he not found. The pith of an oracular 
response lies always in the riddle, and this is the sole 
riddle in the answer brought by Cleomenes and Dion 
from Delphi. " That which is lost " is, of course, Per- 
dita, as her name tells us: and the means of her putting 
away has already been introduced, and very carefully, 
into Act iii. We do not know, to be sure, that Hermione 
lives: yet if, as members of the Globe audience, we 
know our Shakespeare of old, we ought to have guessed 
in Paulina's protestations a something held up his sleeve. 
I grant that it takes a guess, and that Leontes must by 
no means be allowed to surmise the truth. 



THE WINTER'S TALE 259 

But — to return to my main argument — if the critics 
be unintelligent who condemn the general structure of 
The Winter's Tale, they multiply stupidity when they 
proceed to convert and use it in condonation of certain 
flagrant faults: as, for example, when they argue that 
because Shakespeare, by compressing two plots into one 
play, overcrowded the time at his disposal, therefore we 
must overlook the monstrously sudden growth of Leontes's 
jealousy; that he left himself no room to develop ration- 
ally: or, for another example, as when Gervinus, to 
excuse the unworkmanlike trick by which Shakespeare 
scamps the recognition scene between Perdita and her 
father, sagely pleads that " The poet has wisely placed 
the event behind the scenes; otherwise the play would 
be too full of powerful scenes." 

I shall return to both these examples. Just here 
I wish to say that, the purpose of these pages being 
less to give information about Shakespeare than to sug- 
gest ways of reading him by which we can increase for 
ourselves our profit and delight, I have no quarrel with 
any critic on the mere ground of fault-finding : for I hold 
that as a rule he does us better service who draws our 
attention to apparent faults than he who glosses them 
over with ready explanations or quick assurances that they 
are beauties rather than blemishes. 

If we can discover for ourselves that an alleged or an 
apparent fault is, or is not, a real fault, we bring off 
a critical success, however small: our first business in 
this world being to judge for ourselves. It is a historical 
fact that Shakespeare invited the applause of the Globe 
Theatre audience, and it should cost our modesty no great 



260 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

effort to rise to that average. Or we may forget the Globe 
audience and remember only that Shakespeare is address- 
ing lis. 

But, if we would be critics, our first task consists in dis- 
covering what the author is trying to do. This discovered, 
we understand where his true difficulties lie, and when 
we come upon an apparent fault in his work we can 
pretty easily determine whether to condone it — nay, per- 
haps even to admire it — as an honest attempt that has 
fallen short, or to condemn it for a piece of scamped and 
careless workmanship. Thus in The Winter s Tale the 
gap between Acts iii and iv comes of honest failure to 
do an extremely difficult thing, yet a thing well worth 
doing, which Shakespeare essayed again and again until 
at length, in The Tempest, he mastered it. But the play 
abounds in flaws far less venial. 

(3) 

I begin with the jealousy of Leontes. This is actually 
baseless as Othello's: and it has far less excuse than 
Othello's, for it lacks both a villain to suggest and cir- 
cumstances to feed the delusion. It is a caprice of self- 
deception, a maggot suddenly bred in a brain not hitherto 
supposed to be mad. " During less than twenty lines," 
says Professor Wendell, " Leontes is carried through an 
emotional experience which in the case of Othello had been 
prepared for by above two Acts and, when it came, occu- 
pied nearly two hundred and fifty lines. Lacking due 
preparative, it strikes us as monstrous." 

Granted that Leontes, as contrasted with Othello, has 
a naturally jealous disposition — then. Why are we not 



THE WINTER'S TALE 261 

warned of it? Camillo and Antigonus must surely, as 
observant courtiers, have sounded their master's nature 
and detected its master-weakness. But Camillo, who 
opens the play, hints no such knowledge: it comes upon 
him in Scene 2 like a thunder-clap. Antigonus and all 
the rest of the courtiers are simply bewildered: Leontes 
strikes them as a man snatched out of his wits. And 
what of Hermione herself? She has been Leontes' wife 
for several years, and an attentive wife. Yet she has 
no inkling at all of this master-weakness. The revela- 
tion of it in Act ii. Scene 1, outrages not only her honour 
but her understanding. . . . Then, I say, if neither 
the courtiers nor Hermione have guessed, a fortiori we 
are not prepared. I ask any candid reader of the play 
if the surprise of Leontes' insane jealousy does not hit 
him, as it hits every one on the stage, like a blow on 
the face? 

If, on the other hand, Leontes be not a man naturally 
jealous, the awakening of jealousy and the haste with 
which it possesses him shock probability no less. The 
apologists on this side are even more at fault. They can 
only suggest that Shakespeare lacked time and room to 
develop the change in the man. But I take up the little 
volumes of the Temple Shakespeare in which, for handi- 
ness, I have been re-reading his later plays. I note that 
The Tempest, a Court play, occupies 106 pages of print ; 
Pericles, 116 pages; The Winter's Tale, 147 pages; King 
Henry VIII, 148 pages; Cymheline, 169 pages. IN'ow, 
The Winter's Tale, like Cymheline, was written for the 
theatre: Dr. Simon Fonnan's diary records that he wit- 
nessed a performance at The Globe on May 15th, 1611. 



262 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

A short while before, he had witnessed a performance of 
Cymheline at the same house. If, then, for Cymheline 
Shakespeare could be allowed a space of time correspond- 
ent with 169 pages of print, why in The Winter's Tale 
had he to compress his action within a space less by 22 
pages — or between one-eighth and one-seventh ? We are 
dealing with workmanship, and this is an eminently prac- 
tical question, as any playwright will tell us. Shake- 
speare had time, or could have found time, to make 
Leontes' jealousy far more credible than it is. I main- 
tain that he bungled it. 

(4) 

But the play abounds in careless workmanship. Let 
me follow up this really important flaw by instancing a 
few lesser ones: 

(a) The Oracle. " It seems," says Coleridge, " a 
mere indolence in the great bard not to have provided 
in the oracular response (Act ii, Sc. 2) some ground for 
]Hermione's seeming death and sixteen years' voluntary 
concealment ; " and Coleridge even suggests how it could 
have been conveyed, in a single sentence of fifteen words. 
Shakespeare let the opportunity go. The resurrection of 
Hermione thus becomes more startling, but at a total loss 
of dramatic irony. 

(b) Prince Florizel in Act iv, Scene 4, appears in 
shepherd's clothes. " Your high self," Perdita tells him, 

The gracious mark o' the land, you have obscur'd 
With a swain's wearing. 

Yet before the end of the Scene he is exchanging a fine 
court suit for Autolycus' rags. 



THE WINTER'S TALE 263 

[This, by the way, would seem to argue some imper- 
fection in the text as it has reached us; since obviously 
such a blunder could not have survived the first dress 
rehearsal. Yet, strange to say, The Winter's Tale seems 
to be about the most carefully printed play in the whole 
of the First Folio.] 

(c) iNext let us take the fate of Antigonus: and let 
me begin by quoting Professor Sir Walter Ealeigh on 
the fate of this poor man, disposed of in " the most un- 
principled and reckless fashion " : 

Up to the time of his sudden death Antigonus has served his 
maker well; he has played an important part in action, and by his 
devotion and courage has won the affection of all the spectators. It 
is he who saves the daughter of Hermione from the mad rage of the 
King. " I'll pawn the little blood which I have left," he says, " to 
save the innocent." He is allowed to take the child away on condition 
that he shall expose her in some desert place and leave her to the 
mercy of chance. He fulfils his task, and now, by the end of the 
third Act, his part in the play is over. Sixteen years are to pass, 
and new matters are to engage our attention; surely the aged noble- 
man might have been allowed to retire in peace. Shakespeare 
thought otherwise; perhaps he felt it important that no news Avhat- 
ever concerning the child should reach Leontes, and therefore 
resolved to make away with the only likely messenger. Antigonus 
takes an affecting farewell of the infant princess; the weather grows 
stormy; and the rest must be told in Shakespeare's own words. 

Antigonus. Farewell ; 

The day frowns more and more: thou'rt like to have 

A lullaby too rough : I never saw 

The heavens so dim by day. A savage clamour ! 

Well may I get aboard! This is the chase! 

I am gone forever! 

[Eocit, pursued hy a Becr.i 

This is the first we hear of the bear, and would be the last, were 
it not that Shakespeare, having in this wise disposed of poor An- 
tigonus, makes a thrifty use of the remains at the feast of Comedy. 



264 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

The clown comes in to report, with much amusing detail, how the 
bear has only half dined on the old gentleman, and is at it now. It 
is this sort of conduct on the part of the dramatist that the word 
Romance has been used to cover. The thorough-paced Romantic 
critic is fully entitled to refute the objections urged by classic censor* 
against Shakespeare's dramatic method; but if he professes to be 
unable to understand them, he disgraces his own wit. 

This is soundly said; and yet Sir Walter has not 
plumbed the deep damnation of Antigonus' taking-off. 
Its true offence is against economy of workmanship. The 
bear is a naughty superfluity. 

Students of this play may find a little profit and much 
amusement in an acting version prepared by John Kemble 
for Drury Lane, in 1802. Let me quote the precedent 
passage as printed by Kemble; or rather a part of it, 
chiefly for the sake of its stage directions. 

Antigonus says: 

Blossom, speed thee well! 
There lie: {laying down the child) 
And there thy character: (lays dovm a paper) 
There these: {lays down a casket) 
Which may, if fortune please, both breed thee pretty. 
And still rest thine — {Rain and wind) 
The storm begins! * 

There we behold the child Perdita laid with wealth in 
jewels and the evidence of her high parentage beside her. 
All we have now to do as a matter of stage-workmanship 
is to efface Antigonus. But why introduce that bear? 

* Kemble is all wrong with his commas, as is the Cambridge text. 
The casket and papers cannot breed Perdita pretty. How should 
they? The right reading is, of course, 

" Which may, if fortune please, both breed thee, pretty. 
And still rest thine — The storm begins ! " 



THE WINTER'S TALE 265 

The ship that brought Antigonus is riding off the coast 
of Bohemia and is presently engulfed with all her crew. 
The Clown sees it all happen. Then why, in the name 
of economy, not engulf Antigonus with the rest ? — or, bet- 
ter still, as he tries to row aboard? I can discover no 
answer to that. If any one ask my private opinion why 
the bear came on, it is that the Bear-Pit in Southwark, 
hard by the Globe Theatre, had a tame animal to let 
out, and the Globe management took the opportunity 
to make a popular hit. 

(d) 'Next, for Autolycus : I challenge any one to read 
the play through, seat himself at table, and write down 
what Autolycus does to further the plot. Let me not deny 
the knave his place in the picture. That is appropriate 
enough, and delightful. But as a factor in the plot, though 
from the moment of his appearance he seems to be con- 
stantly and elaborately intriguing, in effect he does noth- 
ing at all. As a part of the story he is indeed so neg- 
ligible that Mary Lamb in the Tales from Shalcespeare 
left him out altogether. Yet Autolycus is just the char- 
acter that Charles and Mary Lamb delighted in. Again I 
give you my private opinion: which is that Shakespeare 
meant to make a great deal of Autolycus, very carefully 
elaborated him to take a prominent and amusing part in 
the recognition scene, tired of it all, and suddenly, re- 
solving to scamp the recognition scene, smothered him up 
along with it. 

(e) This brings us to the great fault of all : to the recog- 
nition scene ; or rather to the scamping of it. To be sure, 
if we choose to tread foot with Gervinus and agree that 
" the poet has wisely placed this event behind the scenes, 



266 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

otherwise the play would have been too full of powerful 
scenes " ; if, having been promised a mighty thrill, in 
the great master's fashion, we really prefer two or three 
innominate gentlemen entering and saying, " Have you 
heard ? " " You don't tell me ! " " Ko ? " " Then you have 
lost a sight ! " — I say, if we really prefer this sort of thing, 
which Gervinus calls " in itself a rare masterpiece of prose 
description," then Heaven must be our aid. But if, using 
our own judgment, we read the play and put ourselves in 
the place of its first audience, I ask, Are we not balked? 
In proportion as we have paid tribute to the art of the 
story by letting our interest be intrigued, our emotion 
excited, are we not cheated when Shakespeare lets us 
down with this reported tale? I would point out that it 
nowise resembles the Messengers' tales in Greek tragedy. 
These related bloody deeds, things not to be displayed 
on the stage. 

It is a question of simple dvayvoopiffts — Leontes rec- 
ognising Perdita as his child; and the Greek tragedians 
never weaken the dramatic effect of avayvooptffiS by re- 
moving it out of sight of the audience. ^Avayvcopiffi? 
(Recognition) and nepinkteia (Reversal of Fortune) 
are in fact the two hinges upon which all Greek drama 
turns. 

But apart from our own natural expectation, and apart 
from all rule of tragic workmanship, let us test Gervinus 
with his " otherwise the play would have been too full 
of powerful scenes " by what we know of Shakespeare ; 
who never flinched from cumulative effect, but on the con- 
trary habitually revelled in it. Did he suffer us to lose 



THE WINTER'S TALE 267 

that breathless moment when Sebastian and Viola stand 
and gaze and con each the other, incredulous? 

One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons! 

Did he cast Lear's recognition of Cordelia into oratio 
ohliqua? Did he cut out anything from Macbetli or from 
Hamlet because " otherwise the play would have been too 
full of powerful scenes " ? Or let us consider Cymheline. 
In Cymheline we hold our breath while Shakespeare ac- 
cumulated no less than twenty-four denouements within 
the space of one final Act! And in Leontes' recognition 
of his daughter there is nothing at all to weaken — rather 
everything to strengthen and lead up to and heighten 
— ^the great recognition of Hermione. 

Why, then, did Shakespeare shirk it? That I cannot 
answer, save by borrowing the words of Elijah: 

Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, 
or he is on a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth and must be 
awaked. 

— by which I mean no more than just this: The longer 
we consider these later plays that fall to be dated between 
the great tragedies and The Tempest, the more we are 
forced to feel that — to cast it in terms befitting the vague- 
ness of the surmise — " something had happened." I 
am not referring to that strange sunset atmosphere which 
so many have noted; nor to that sublime confusion of 
dates and places which some set down to carelessness, 
but which I believe to be part of the method which de- 
liberately sets the story in a fairy haze, so that it be- 
longs to no age but to all time. The anachronisms in 



268 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

The Winter's Tale are as flagrant as those in Cymheline. 
" Whitsim pastorals," " Christian burial," Giulio Ro- 
mano, the Emperor of Russia, and Puritans singing 
psalms to hornpipes, all contemporary with the Oracle of 
Delphi — " the island of Delphi " ! They jar us less than 
the anachronisms of Cymheline, but only because Cym- 
heline professes to be history of a sort, whereas The 
Winter s Tale but professes to be a tale: and Bohemia is 
as welcome to a sea-coast as Prospero to happen on a West 
Indian islet in the Mediterranean. " Faery — deliberate 
faery " is the answer : " the light that never was on sea 
or land " — but do we not wish it was ? Faery — deliberate 
faery : the nursery tale of Snowflake translated into Cym- 
heline, Danae and the floating cradle translated into Peri- 
cles: the Princess turned Goose-girl, the disguised Prince, 
the clownish foster-father and foster-brother, translated 
into The Winter's Tale. 

~So : I am not thinking of these touches, which may as 
easily be beauty-spots as blemishes: but rather of those 
laxities of construction, of workmanship, with which may- 
be this paper has been disproportionately concerned: of 
the tours de force also, mixed up in Pericles and Henry 
VIII with other men's botchwork, confused here, in The 
Winter's Tale, with serious scampings of artistry. 

(5) 

Coming back to our strict enquiry into the workman- 
ship of The Winter's Tale, we must admit that the play 
never lodges in our minds as a whole, is never compact as 
(for instance) As You Like It, or Much Ado, or Twelfth 
Night, or Measure for Measure; or as Macheth, or Othello, 



THE WINTER'S TALE 269 

or even Antony and Cleopatra is compact, or as The 
Tempest is compact. It leaves no single impression. We 
think majbe of Hermione's most noble rebuke: 

Adieu, my lord: 
I never wish'd to see you sorry; now 
I trust I shall. My women, come; you have leave. 

We think of her, grandly innocent, in the trial scene: or 
we see her, in the last Act, the statue made life, in the 
hush of the music, stepping do^vn to forgive Leontes, 
brought to him, like Alcestis, from the grave, turning from 
him to stretch hands over Perdita who kneels: 

You gods, look down, 
And from your sacred viala pour your graces 
Upon my daughter's head, 

then, catching her, holding her a little away, searching 
her eyes to make sure of bliss. 

Tell me, mine own, 
Where hast thou been preserv'd? Where liv'dT . . . 

Or again we think of Paulina, that admirable woman 
in Shakespeare's gallery; prototype of ITurse Berry in 
Richard Feverel, with a touch of Madame Sans-Gene, and 
of that excellent scene in which she beards Leontes, and all 
the king's horses and all the king's men cannot stay her 
tongue. But first of all, when The Winter s Tale comes 
to our mind, nine out of ten of us think of the sheep- 
shearing feast and Perdita handing flowers — ^gem of all 
pastorals : 

I would I had some flowers of the Spring that might 
Become your time of day: and yours, and yours, 



270 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

That wear upon your virgin branches yet 

Your maidenheads growing — O Proserpina, 

For the flowers now that, frighted, thou let'st fall 

From Dis's waggon! . . . Daffodils 

That come before the swallow dares, and take 

The winds of March with beauty; violets dim, 

But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes 

Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses, 

That die unmarried ere they can behold 

Bright Phoebus in his strength — a malady 

Most incident to maids: bold oxlips and 

The crovm imperial: lilies of all kinds. 

The flower-de-luce being one. . . . 

— ^never the total play; but ever separate scene after 
scene, and this the unapproachable one, in which Florizel 
and Perdita, no active persons in the drama, find them- 
selves the centre of it, being young and innocent and in 
love. That is all, but it is enough. 

Love is enough: ho, ye who seek saving, 

Go no further, come hither! there have been who found it, 

And these know the House of Fulfilment of Craving. . . . 

These know the cup -with the roses around it, 

These know the World's wound and the balm that hath bound it: 

Cry out! the World heedeth not, "Love lead us home! " 



CHAPTER XV 

THE TEMPEST 

The three following chapters on " The Tempest " were 
delivered as lectures before the University of Cambridge 
in the Michaelmas Term of 1915^ and were prefaced by 
the following words: — 

Here in Cambridge, in a second Michaelmas Term of 
War, it may seem an idleness to be talking about poetry. 
But I say to you that it is not. I say that an Englishman 
who, not having shirked any immediate services within 
his power, in these days improves and exalts himself by 
studying such a work of art as " The Tempest," lets ride 
his soul, as good ships should, upon a double anchor. 
There is the lesser anchor of pride, that, happen what 
may, here is something our enemy can as little take from 
us as he can imitate it: that the best part of revenge is 
to be different from our enemy and hopelessly beyond his 
copying, whatever he may destroy. But there is also the 
better anchor of confidence, that in a world where men 
just now seem chiefly to value science for its power to 
slay, we hold to something as strong as it is benign and 
careless of death, because immortal. 



Date of The Tempest — Cunningham's discovery — His rehabilitation 
— Dr. Gamett's theory — Elizabeth of Bohemia — Probability of the 
play's revision for a nuptial ceremony. 

(1) 

Everybody knows that The Tempest is the first play 
printed in the First Folio of 1623 : which, for aught anj- 

271 



272 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

body knows, — indeed almost certainly — ^was its first ap- 
pearance in print. Why Heminge and Condell, the edi- 
tors, gave it that pride of place is a puzzling question if 
we choose, but not at all beyond conjecture. I shall sug- 
gest one or two reasons before I have done: but the best 
answer lies in the fact that no editor of taste has ever 
disobeyed the First Folio's lead ; as neither, of course, did 
Charles and Mary Lamb in their Tales from Shakespeare. 
And yet almost everybody allows The Tempest to be a late 
play ; one of the latest, if not the very latest, that Shake- 
epeare wrote. 

I hope, in the following enquiry — still using the method 
we applied to Pericles, Cymbeline, The ^V inter s Tale — 
to lay before the reader some arguments for believing 
that The Tempest was Shakespeare's very last play; by 
which, of course, I mean the last of his sole authorship, 
putting aside King Henry VIII and The Two Nohle 
Kinsmen, of which he was but part author. I think most 
of us would like to believe The Tempest his last work 
and to cherish the fancy (originated, I believe, by a poet, 
Campbell) that when Prospero puts off his mantle, breaks 
his staff, and drowns his great book 

deeper than did ever plummet sound, 

it is Shakespeare himself who in the ritual bids a long 
farewell to his realm of magic. 

ITevertheless we must not neglect such prosaic stuff 
as contemporary records, diaries, play-bills, audits. 
" There is such a thing as ' circumstantial evidence,' " 
says Thoreau, "as, for instance, when we find a trout in 
the milk-jug." There is also such a thing as direct ex- 



THE TEMPEST 273 

temal evidence: and before hazarding our criticism 
upon Prospero's island, we must beat off a coast less 
romantic. 

Of direct external evidence to date The Tempest, noth- 
ing was discovered until 1842, when Mr. Peter Cunning- 
ham, a promising antiquary, edited for ' The Shake- 
speare Society ' (of which he was Treasurer) certain 
* Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court in the 
Eeigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I.' Among 
these was an entry taken from the account-book for the 
years 1611-1612. It ran: 

By the Kings Hallomas nyght was presented at Whthall before 
Players ye Kinges matie A Play called The Tempest 

Apart from his growing reputation as an antiquary, men 
knew young Mr. Peter Cunningham (son of Allan Cun- 
ningham, the poet) as an enthusiastic young man of 
twenty-six; a clerk, on Sir Robert Peel's appointment, in 
the Audit Office, where he rose to be chief Clerk. His 
Life of Inigo Jones and his Life of Nell Gwynne still hold 
their own on the second-hand book-stalls, and his edi- 
tion of Horace Walpole's Letters, though superseded for 
serious reading, recently had its life prolonged in a cheap 
reprint. Young Mr. Peter Cunningham, then, had been 
searching for old papers in Somerset House ; " rummag- 
ing " — to quote his own words — 

" in dry repositories, damp cellars, and still damper vaults. . . . 
My last discovery was the most interesting; and alighting, as I did, 
upon two official books of The Revels— one of Tylney's and one of 
Bug's — which had escaped both Musgrave and Malone, I at last 
found something about Shakespeare, something that was new, and 
something that was definite." 



274 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

For settling the date of The Tempest, at all events, 
nothing could be more definite or conclusive. To be sure, 
an entry that it had been performed by the King's players 
before the King's Majesty on Hallowmas night, 1611, did 
not prove this to have been the first performance. But 
the whole play wears the look of having been designed for 
a Court entertainment. Its brevity — 2,068 lines, which 
yet permits two masques, or entr'actes to be included — 
its fairy atmosphere, borrowed and sublimated from A 
Midsummer-Night's Dream, a play undoubtedly written 
for the Court — a hint here, there a turn of speech — all 
point the same way. And then the alleged date, 1611, 
was recognised as coming most acceptably pat upon the 
famous wreck of the Virginia Elect off Bermudas, or, 
rather, the return of the survivors to England. One of 
them, Silvester Jourdan, had written an account of it, 
dating his dedication Oct. 13, 1610: to which narrative, 
as well as to a pamphlet issued by the Council of Vir- 
ginia, the play owes several small debts. 

Scholars, in short, took the matter as settled: 1611 
was the date. This, I say, happened in 1842. 

Twenty-six years later — on April 26, 1868 — Sir Fred- 
erick Madden, Keeper of Manuscripts in the British 
Museum, received a letter offering for sale two highly 
interesting documents of the time of James I — the Ac- 
count Books of the Revels Office for 1604-5 and 1611-12. 
The writer stated that some thirty years before, when a 
Clerk in the Audit Office, he had found these papers 
" under the vaults of Somerset House — far under the 
Quadrangle, in a dry and lofty cellar known by the name 
of the Charcoal Bepository." " Had I been a rich man," 



THE TEMPEST 275 

he went on, " I would have presented these highly inter- 
esting papers to the ISTation " : but, as it was, he would be 
content with any sum that the Trustees of the British 
Museum might see fit to give him. That the writer was 
a Scotsman you will have guessed from the phrase " Had 
I been a rich man, I would have presented " : an Eng- 
lishman would have written " I should." But he signed 
a name familiar to the Museum authorities. They an- 
swered, asking him to state a price for the trove. He 
replied, " I have written to Collier about the Revels Ac- 
count I sent you: and he will write to you." Two days 
later he wrote again — Collier keeping silence — " I do not 
think I am asking too much of the Trustees of the British 
Museum, when I ask Sixty Guineas for them." 

A more fatal reference could not have been given. Eor 
this Collier was the notorious John Payne Collier, who 
within quite recent memory (1858) had fallen like Luci- 
fer from a world-wide reputation as the one man of 
genius among Shakespearean scholars to an equally wide 
dishonour as the most diabolically clever of Shakespearean 
forgers; the wickeder because, on the repute of his com- 
bined learning and ingenuity, documents above price had 
been entrusted to his private hands. He had used them 
all, forging entries upon them remorselessly. The story 
of John Payne Collier yet waits to be written as a study 
in perversity of genius. But this is by the way. He had 
been thoroughly exposed and ruined, some time before. 
The man who quoted him for an opinion on the price 
of a manuscript stirred up a name that stank. 

Sir Frederick Madden made some enquiries; im- 
pounded the documents, and after a very brief interval 



276 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

had them handed over (26th May, 1865) to the Record 
Office, where they still abide among the books labelled 
^ Audit Office Declared Accounts — Various/ He acted 
rightly, of course; since on the would-be seller's own ad- 
mission, however he had come by them, these documents 
had been stolen from the State. 

1*^0 action was taken to prosecute any one. After a 
while, however, it leaked out that the would-be seller, a 
man who had been in unlawful possession of them for 
thirty years and at length tried to palm them off on the 
British Museum for his own, was no other than the Peter 
Cunningham who in 1842 had published his discovery, 
among others, of the date of The Tempest in the 
" dry repositories, damp cellars, etc." under Somerset 
House. 

The explanation lies just here. — In 1868 Peter Cun- 
ningham was a man broken by drink ; retired, at the age 
of forty-two, out of the Audit Office, and now so far 
broken that his poor brain could scarcely distinguish be- 
tween meum and iuum. During his clerkship the archives 
of the Audit Office, hitherto inaccessible to the gen- 
eral public, had been carted over to the Record Office 
en hloc, unsorted, unindexed. He had " borrowed " a 
couple of volumes, taken them home, worked upon them. 
His bemused brain belike no more remembered that he 
had worked upon them and given his extracts a publicity 
to expose him than it saved him from the direst error 
of all — that of calling upon Collier, once the god of his 
adoration, to be judge, at that time of day, of the worth 
of what he offered. 

There lay his fatal mistake: though it is doubtful if 



THE TEMPEST Hll 

he ever realised it, to care. For the Museum Authorities 
pitied him, knowing his past, and took no steps. But 
as luck would have it, the 1604-5 entries, occupying two 
pages of the MS. book, were in a different hand from the 
rest of the script. These entries happened to include 
one performance of Othello, concerning the date of which 
play Shakespearean scholars had been for years at log- 
gerheads. The shadiness of the whole transaction, mixed 
up as it was with the name of Collier, at once raised 
the cry of " Forgery ! " No one seriously contested it — 
" Cunningham and Collier are tarred with the same 
brush," " Cunningham is Collier's jackal," " We have 
tracked Collier down with endless pains. Shall we now 
have to start afresh upon Cunningham ? " For Dyce and 
Halliwell-Phillips — two of the most judicious Shake- 
speareans of that day — the question was at once decided 
on Duffus Hardy's private assurance that the whole busi- 
ness was a forgery. " It only required a glance of the 
experts." " And now who is the forger ? The conclusion 
that Peter Cunningham is the man seems unavoidable." 

Meanwhile Peter Cunningham heard or heard not; 
made no sign; at any rate offered no defence; secure 
against prosecution for theft, went on drinking himself 
to death; and so died, uuprotesting. 

His guilt was henceforth taken for granted. Even so 
cautious a scholar as the late Mr. Aldis Wright, com- 
menting on the once-authoritative extract relating to The 
Tempest, says boldly: 

It is now ascertained that this entry and all the others of a 
eimilar kind contained in the books of the Revels numbered XII 
and XIII, are undoubted forgeries. 



278 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Thus it came to pass that from 1868 and the hour of poor 
Cunningham's exposure, for forty-odd years, the date of 
The Tempest rested where it had relapsed, in uncertainty ; 
conjecture, however, still playing around the incrimi- 
nated 1611, with which all verse-tests and other internal 
evidence seemed, on the whole, best to fit. 

But in George Vertue's Collection of MSS. there 
is to be found another entry, and a certainly genuine 
one, concerning our play: recording that it was acted 
by John Heminge (co-editor of the Eirst Eolio) and 
the rest of the King's Company of Players before 
Prince Charles, the Lady Elizabeth and the Prince Pala- 
tine Elector in the beginning of the year 1613. Prince 
Charles of course was he who afterwards became Charles 
I; the Lady Elizabeth she whom we know as Elizabeth 
of Bohemia; and the Prince Palatine Elector that ill- 
starred Erederic who came here to wed her and carry 
iher off to strange romantic fortunes. In place of earlier 
certainty there now grew a fascinating hypothesis ; started 
long since by Tieck and elaborated with rare critical 
skill and sympathy by the late Dr. Garnett, that this 
authentic record of The Tempest, a court-play acted to 
adorn the nuptials of Elizabeth of Bohemia, refers in fact 
to its first performance; that The Tempest was written 
expressly for her bridal. 

(2) 
I wish I could believe it true. I would give much to 
be able to believe it true. Eor a long while I firmly held 
it to be true, as Dr. Garnett's arguments had wound them- 
selves in, conquering a willing belief. Eor who, know- 



THE TEMPEST 279 

ing the story of Elizabetli of Bohemia, would not wish 
her the lady for such a gift as The Tempest? There 
are a certain few women in history who in life fascinated 
the souls out of men, for good or evil, and still fascinate 
the imagination of mankind, though themselves have been 
dust for centuries. Helen of Troy is one, of course, and 
Cleopatra another. These two were wanton and light of 
love; but virtue, or the lack of it, skills not. Eor Joan 
of Arc is a third, a maid and a saint above saints; and 
Catherine of Siena, another saint, is a fourth ; and a fifth 
is Mary Queen of Scots, who was what you will — except 
a saint. But of her grand-daughter, Elizabeth of Bo- 
hemia — ^wayward, lovely, extravagant, unfortunate, ador- 
able and peerless — what shall I say? Let me rehearse 
Wotton's lines on her: 

You meaner beauties of the night, 

That poorly satisfy our eyes 
More by your number than your light. 

You common people of the skies; 
What are you, when the moon shall rise? 

You violets that first appear 
By your pure purple mantles known, 

Like the proud virgins of the year. 
As if the Spring were all your ovm; 

What are you, when the rose ia blovpn? 

So, when my mistress shall be seen 

In form and beauty of her mind 
By virtue first, then choice, a Queen, 

Tell me, if she were not design'd 
Th' eclipse and glory of her kind. 

'' Th* eclipse and glory of her kind " — if that strike the 
reader as court eulogy — rather better done than usual — 



280 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

but yet court eulogy, I will tell liim a better and more 
curious thing. If he will read the history of the early 
17th century and track the influence of Elizabeth of Bo- 
hemia, he will find that scarce ever a man came in range 
of her but he knelt her sworn knight : and, what is more, 
he either followed her hapless fortune to the last ex- 
tremity, proud only to serve; or, called away, he went as 
though a great illusion had broken within him ; as though 
having once knelt before a revelation, thereafter, laying 
down pride, ambition, self, his ambition and his content 
accepted the pursuit of a dream in which the world 
were well lost. We may see this strange conversion in 
Wotton, who wrote the stanzas I have quoted. We may 
see it, wildly deflected, in Donne. We may trace it in 
the life of Sir Dudley Carleton. We may see it, more 
naively expressed, in this well-authenticated story. 

A company of young men of the Middle Temple met together for 
supper; and when the wine went round the first man rose, and 
holding a cup in one hand and a sword in the other, pledged the 
health of this distressed Princess, the Lady Elizabeth; and having 
drunk, he kissed the sword, and laying hand upon it, took a solemn 
oath to live and die in her service. His ardour kindled the whole 
company. They all rose, and from one to another the cup and 
sword went round till each had taken the pledge. 

We may see it — ^to make an end with the devotedest — 
in Lord Craven, a Lord Mayor's son, who, having poured 
blood and money in her service, ever constant, laid his 
last wealth at her feet to provide her a stately refuge and 
a home. Through all the story she — ^mother of Rupert of 
the Rhine — rides conquering all hearts near her, reck- 
less, spendthrift, somehow ineffably great; and lifting, 
in a desperate cause, all those hearts to ride with her 



THE TEMPEST 281 

despising low ends, ignoble gains — to ride with her down 
and nobly over the last, lost edge of the world. 

I say it was pleasant to imagine The Tempest written 
for the bridals of this wonderful woman; to read this 
immortal play and think of Shakespeare breaking his staff 
before one who — if the sceptred race and the charm divine 
guaranteed aught — guaranteed all for the next generation 
in whose hope good men live. 

(3) 

But there is a beggar at the gate of this joy: a dead 
beggar too; yet claiming our justice as in life he had 
fallen too low to care — let alone to clamour — for it. 

Peter Cunningham went unpunished by law. ^o pro- 
ceedings were ever taken against him, and the authori- 
ties (it would seem) were equally careless of establish- 
ing his guilt to their own private and reasonable satis- 
faction. The name of Collier, which he had invoked so 
pathetically — from a lifelong habit of loyalty that could 
not realise what had befallen his admired master — suf- 
ficed to damn him out of hand. 

Thus the matter rested until, some four or five years 
ago, there came along a man — Mr. Ernest Law, learned 
author of The History of Hampton Court — who asked 
questions. He started with a prejudice against Cunning- 
ham : indeed, took his guilt almost for granted. But he ex- 
amined the Revels Books and began to doubt : he spoke of 
his doubt to one or two officials in the Record Office, and 
found to his surprise that they, too, had some misgiv- 
ings : " though," as he says, " responsibility naturally ob- 



282 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

liged in them a more reserved attitude than was incum- 
bent in an outsider, in questioning a verdict which, more 
or less ofiBcially adopted, had remained so long unchal- 
lenged." Mr. Law called in experts to his aid; ink and 
paper were examined microscopically; and the result was 
a little tractate, published in 1911, on ' Some Supposed 
Shakespeare Forgeries.' I do not see how any one who 
reads with a judicious mind can deny that Mr. Law 
proves his case; that Peter Cunningham, unlawfully pos- 
sessed of these books, did not tamper with them in any 
way: and (what alone concerns us here) that the 1611 
entries, at any rate, including that of The Tempest, are 
quite above suspicion. 

So there we are, after forty-odd years, back at the old 
date: and The Tempest was not originally composed for 
the nuptials of the Princess Elizabeth. 

(4) 

Yet let us go softly I The Tempest was played in 1613, 
to grace those nuptials: and my mind harbours a fancy, 
and something more than a fancy, that in the play as 
we now have it — as Heminge, who acted in it on that 
famous occasion, redacted it for the 1623 Folio — we have 
the 1611 play adapted, improved, and cast in its lovely 
final form. 

For The Tempest, as it stands, is obviously a court 
play ; and as obviously intended to grace a wedding. 

Honour, riches, marriage-blessing, 
Long continuance, and increasing, 
Hourly joys be still upon you! 
Juno sings her blessings on you. 



THE TEMPEST 283 

As Dr. Garnett points out, you cannot cut away the 
Masque of Iris but you make impertinent Prospero's lines 
that immediately follow; by admission among the grand- 
est — yes, and the delicatest — that Shakespeare ever wrote. 
For Prospero does not say, as so many misquote him — 



And, like the baseless fabric of a vision . 



but— 



And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, 
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself. 
Yea all which it inherit, shall dissolve; 
And like this insubstantial pageant, faded. 
Leave not a wrack behind. 

Yet I cannot find record of any nuptials meet to be cele- 
brated thus on or about Hallowmas Night 1611. !N"ow, 
the wedding of the Prince Palatine with Princess 
Elizabeth was occasion enough — as all the records prove 
— to summon any great playwright up from a country 
retirement, however obstinate; to call on him, however 
weary, to nerve himself for a last triumph, to put forth 
all his powers. 

Por the occasion was tremendous. London went wild 
over it. The festivities lasted for weeks. Por a sample : 

The first of these fetes was a mock naval fight upon the river 
Thames, for which thirty-six vessels, 500 watermen and 1,000 
musketeers were put in requisition, besides four floating castles with 
fireworks. The scene to be represented was the siege of Algiers. On 
the bank of the Thames opposite Whitehall a mock town was 
erected, the bombardment of which was to form the amusement of 
the 11th of February. The King, Prince Charles, the Princess Eliza- 
beth and the Elector, with their suites and many of the nobility, 
stationed themselves at the Palace windows; and at a signal given 



284 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

by the discharge of cannon the performance commenced. Thirty-six 
balls of fire arose from the castles on the river and descended, some 
in fiery rain, some in thousands of smaller globes. Then, mounted 
on cords attached to one of the vessels, an armed figure appeared, 
representing St. George with his lance, and also a young maiden 
and an immense dragon. St. George and the dragon had a long 
combat, hurling fires at each other, which served as torches to dis- 
play the beauty of the maiden; till, at the end of half an hour, the 
dragon exploded with a terrific report; and then St. George and 
the maiden sported with fires till both were consumed. When the 
smoke cleared away a mountain appeared in the water, and from 
a cave in its side issued a comet which discharged an infinite 
number of fusees, whilst a fiery stag, pursued by hunters, made a 
tumultuous rush into the water, where, after a brief chase, all 
exploded together.^ 

For the cost of it all, let us perpend this, bearing in mind 
how the purchasing power of money has diminished in 
these centuries (we may multiply by 12 and still be 
cautious) : — 

The magnificence of the marriage preparations completely bank- 
rupted the Eoyal exchequer . . . £53,294 was expended, exclusive 
of the bride's portion of £40,000. 

Add the two together, multiply by twelve, and we get a 
sum considerably over a million of our money — nearer a 
million and a quarter. There was in the middle of it 
what in less exalted households is known (I believe) as 
a row. James I of England was, the reader will remem- 
ber, also James VI of Scotland. 

In a sudden fit of economy the Court was broken up: and to the 
bitter mortification of the Lady Elizabeth, the household provided 

* I quote from the late Mrs. Everett Green's biography of the 
Princess Elizabeth, first printed as one of her Lives of the Prin- 
cesses of England, afterwards enlarged and issued as a separate 
volume. A new edition has recently been published. 



THE TEMPEST 285 

for her husband was abruptly dismissed. Frederic, responding to 
the hint thus thrown out, gave intimation to most of the attendants 
who came over with him (but remained at the King's expense) that 
their visit had already been sufficiently prolonged. 

Which reminds one of Mr. Bennett in Pride and Preju- 
dice, and how he persuaded his daughter Mary to quit 
the piano. " That will do excellently well, child. You 
have delighted us long enough." 
The narrative ends abruptly: 

The King, to save appearance, left town for Newmarket. 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE TEMPEST 

II 

Workmanship is evidence of date of Tempest — Comparison with 
The Winter's Tale — Gonzalo's commonwealth — ^Youthful love stronger 
than Prospero's magic — An exquisite surprise — The most beautiful 
love-scene in Shakespeare — Supposed sources of the play — Its cen- 
tral theme — Difficulty of handling reconciliation in a three-hours 
play — Shakespeare's attempts to overcome it — The Unities not laws 
but graces — Shakespeare's " royal ease." 

(1) 

FoETUNATELY — and by that word I confess a prejudice 
— even when we have accepted the evidence of the Revels 
Book that there was a performance of The Tempest on 
Hallowmas Night (Nov. 1st), 1611, before His Maj- 
esty in his new banqueting-room at Whitehall, we are 
still able to believe it the very last play written by 
Shakespeare. No scrap of external evidence forbids 
that. 

In The Winter's Tale we have its one serious challenger 
for the place. But we can certainly date The Winter s 
Tale back to the early summer of 1611 ; for on May 
15th our old friend Dr. Simon Forman, physician and 
astrologer, saw it performed at the Globe Theatre, as he 
has recorded (appending a sketch of the plot) in his 
journal, A BooJce of Plaies and Notes thereof, pre- 
served in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and un- 

286 



THE TEMPEST 287 

doubtedly genuine. This antedates the earliest recorded 
performance of The Tempest. I would not press the 
point unduly: as still less would I insist upon it as sig- 
nificant that when Ben Jonson jibed at the two plays in 
the Introduction to his Bartholomew Fair (1614), he 
spoke of " those who beget Tales, Tempests and suchlike 
drolleries " — using that order. Nor again, passing from 
external evidence to metrical tests, can I pretend that 
they settle the question, though I think it remarkable 
that in The Tempest the percentage of blank verse with 
what we call ' feminine endings ' is 35.4; easily the high- 
est in the whole of Shakespeare, 2y2^ higher than The 
Winter's Tale, which beats Cymheline by more than 2^ 
which again beats All's Well That Ends Well, which in 
turn beats Lear and Coriolanus; and these six head the 
list. " But this," an objector may say, " is the evidence 
of straws." Then let me bring better evidence, still us- 
ing the method followed in my former papers: that of 
testing each play by its workmanship. 

(2) 

For a beginning. — No one can read The Winter's Tale 
and The Tempest side by side and fail to observe that 
they contain a number of stage devices almost identical, 
but turned to different account. Further, many of these 
devices are so frequent in Shakespeare's later plays that 
we may almost say they had become his final stock-in- 
trade. Let us take a few examples. 

(1) Perdita and Miranda (and Marina for that mat- 
ter; but we will not here deal with Pericles) are 
both Princesses — the one Royal, the other ducal — 



288 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

who as infants have been exposed to almost certain 
death and cast away on a strange shore. 

(2) Both grow up in complete ignorance of the high 
fortune to which they are rightfully heiresses. 

Miranda, questioned by her father — 

Canst thou remember 
A time before we came unto this cell? 
I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not 
Out three years old — 

can only answer 

Certainly, sir, I can . . , 
'Tis far off 
And rather like a dream than an assurance 
That my remembrance warrants. Had I not 
Four or five women once that tended me? 

(3) Both Perdita and Miranda owe their deliverance 
to a good honest courtier, who, charged to see their 
death, finds his heart melt at the last moment. We 
have the same device in Pericles and again in 
Cymbeline, and indeed it is one of Shakespeare's 
favourites. 

But here observe how far more artistically he works 
it in The Tempest. As the reader will remember, Per- 
dita's appointed executioner is the old courtier Antig- 
onus ; and in dealing with The \Yinter's Tale I had some- 
thing to say of the unprincipled and reckless manner in 
which Shakespeare disposes of him. It sins against all 
true economy of workmanship. 

But why kill Antigonus at all? Let us turn to The 
Tempest and remark well what greater skill it uses with his 



THE TEMPEST 289 

counterpart Gonzalo. To begin with, Gonzalo survives: 
which is poetical justice. Further, we see him on the 
island still true, after many years, to his character of loyal- 
heaj-ted servant, still active in his loyalty, which in turn 
advances the action of the play. Is it not a delicate 
stroke that, when Miranda first hears the story of her cast- 
ing away, of all the shipwrecked company near at hand, 
though she knows it not, this old counsellor is the man 
she desires to see ? (But she is heart-whole yet, be it re- 
membered, and has never set eyes on a personable youth.) 
Let us consider the lines in which Prospero relates their 
dreadful passage — 

Some food we had, and some fresh water, that 

A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo, 

Out of his charity, who, being then appointed 

Master of this design, did give us, with 

Rich garments, linens, stuffs and necessaries 

Which since have steaded much; so of his gentleness. 

Knowing I lov'd ray books, he furnish'd me 

From mine own library with volumes that 

I prize above my dukedom. 

Miranda. Would I might 

But ever see that man ! 

So in the end he is not only one of the company that 
provides Miranda with cause for her most exquisite cry of 

O wonder! 
How many goodly creatures are there here! 
How beauteous mankind is! brave new world, 
That has such people in it! 

But it is he who utters the great cry of reconciliation: 

Look down, you gods. 
And on this couple drop a blessed crown! 



290 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

echoing unmistakably Hermione's invocation in The 
'Winter's Tale — 

You gods, look down. 
And from your sacred vials pour your graces 
Upon my daughter's head! 

To resume our list: — 

(4) Both Perdita's and Miranda's fortunes turn 
• cardinally on a storm and a shipwreck. I shall have 

something to say of the opening Scene of The 
Tempest by-and-hy. For the moment I note what 
nobody will gainsay: that its storm and shipwreck 
are ten times as well managed as the shipwreck in 
The Winter's Tale. 

(5) Both shipwrecks happen off a coast " in faery 
lands forlorn." For the compass-bearings of Pros- 
pero's island we may search the map as profitably as 
for the seaboard of Bohemia. The commentators 
chase it to the Bermudas, back to Lampedusa, and 
away again to Pantellaria, to Corcyra: but they 
never make its landfall; and why? It isn't there. 

(6) To Miranda as to Perdita — ^both discovered as 
adorable and ripe for love — there arrives the Fairy 
Prince ; who also happens to be the one youth in the 
world to heal the old wrong between their parents. 
Had Florizel been any Prince of otherwhere than 
Bohemia, Ferdinand any Prince of otherwhere than 
Naples, why then of course there had been nothing 
reconciled and, of course, no play. Yet — ^wait! — I 
go too fast. Ferdinand might have been made son 
of Antonio, usurping Duke of Milan : and there were 



THE TEMPEST 291 

possibilities in that. But so, whereas Bohemia had 
married Sicilia, Milan would have married Milan; 
cousin, cousin ; the wrongful Milan the rightful, and 
the wrongful lover, as husband, become ruler and 
lord. I suggest that Shakespeare greatly refines on 
this by making Ferdinand, son of Alonzo King of 
iN'aples, temporal overlord of rightful and wrongful 
in Milan: that thus he avoids a difficulty which did 
not occur in The Winter's Tale, and yet leaves room 
for reconciliation. Alonzo of IsTaples, albeit " an 
enemy " — as Prospero says — " to me inveterate," is 
not guilty in the same degree as Antonio. His sin 
is, to have abetted the usurper's suit — 

Which was that he [Alonzo], in lieu o' the premisea, 
Of homage and I know not how much tribute. 
Should presently extirpate me and mine 
Out of the dukedom, and confer fair Milan, 
With all the honours, on my brother ; whereon 
A treacherous army levied, one midnight 
Fated to the purpose, did Antonio ope 
The gates of Milan. — 

There was the crime, and I am to suggest some points 
on which the playwright scores (as we should say) by giv- 
ing the conspiracy just that shape. 

To begin with, he avoids making his Eairy Prince the 
eon of an arch-villain. In any play this would go near 
to shock us ; in a romantic play it would certainly revolt 
us. ITo doubt bad fathers before now have begotten good 
heirs, even as (to quote Miranda) " good wombs have 
borne bad sons." But Antonio is altogether too much 
of a scoundrel for us to delight in a prosperous wooing 
by any son of his, or at any rate to delight in a wooing 



292 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

the prosperity of which leaves his villainy not only un- 
punished but successful. In The Winter s Tale Florizel's 
father had done cruel wrong, but under the hallucina- 
tion of jealousy. He is not a villain. ISFow Antonio is 
one, and bad in grain. 

[N'ext, by this shift of invention Shakespeare wins a 
further freedom — to develop Antonio's villainy: to make 
him go from bad to worse under our eyes, and in the 
natural manner of traitors; to plot, for further self-ad- 
vancement, to kill the very man by whose patronage he 
had mounted. And (to have done with Antonio) the 
same shift of invention leaves him open, in the end, to 
the full and condign, if merciful, punishment that child- 
less he shall see all his ambition laid in ruin, while the 
two realms he has sold his soul for pass, enhanced by 
union, to the daughter of the first good man, the son of 
the second, whom he has plotted to destroy. 

As for Alonzo, King of ISTaples, he has been weak, and, 
by being weak, helped the old wrong. But he is a good 
man at heart, and we find him sufficiently punished by 
the two or three hours of anguish he has endured, be- 
lieving his only son drowned. 

Lastly, on this point (if the reader be not wearied 
with Gonzalo, who is an old favourite of mine), by this 
device enabled to show Antonio's second conspiracy in 
operation, Shakespeare (borrowing freely from Mon- 
taigne) is enabled also to give us a sketch — ^thrown out, 
as it were, in passing — exquisite in few lines, as 
genial as it is wise, humorous and yet wistfully attuned 
to the moral of the whole play, " We are such stuff 
as dreams are made on " — a sketch, a parable too (if 



THE TEMPEST 293 

we will) of Gonzalo the old counsellor, ruse in politics 
but still faithful to Milan, while still beyond Milan ho 
cherishes an idea of the perfect commonwealth not realis- 
able on earth, though mayhap (he deems) it might be on 
some sucb island as this on which they have fallen — 

Had I plantation of this isle, my lord — 

The younger courtiers interrupt, mocking: but he per- 
sists — 

I' the commonwealth I would by contraries 
Execute all things: for no kind of traffic 
Would I admit: no name of magistrate; 
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, 
And use of service, none; contract, succession, 
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; 

No occupation; all men idle, all; 

And women too, but innocent and pure; 

No sovereignty . . . 

All things in common nature should produce 

Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony, 

Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine 

Would I not have : but nature should bring forth 

Of it own kind all foison, all abundance 

To feed my innocent people. 

Dreams, dreams of an old man ! Yet still generous 
' dreams; and such as thousands of young men since Gon- 
zalo have indulged in; Coleridge — the early Coleridge — 
and Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley ; in our own day William 
Morris notably and Gordon of Khartoum. Thousands of 
eager high-spirited men have seen the vision; and, il- 
lusory though it may be, it has a call for the nobler souls 
among us. But the young men around Gonzalo laugh; 
and he is old, tired. " Will you laugh me asleep, for I 



294 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

am very heavy ? " So he sleeps, and awakes — to be re- 
warded, not with any new heaven on earth, but (perhaps 
more happily for him, after all) with the best earthly 
thing that could betide in a world he has served worldlily 
yet well. 

(3) 

But it is time we returned to our Princes and Prin- 
cesses. I find Ferdinand an improvement on Elorizel in, 
more than one way. Even his introduction is bet- 
ter managed. He is drawn into the scheme, whereas 
Florizel's meeting with Perdita merely happens. Old 
Antigonus on shipboard just bumps on the first coast 
he comes to and deposits Perdita, who in due course 
grows up and is chanced upon by her lover. But Ferdi- 
nand, travelling the wide seas, is deliberately caught in a 
vortex and sucked by Prospero's art and prescience 
through perilous foam to the island; where he woos 
his maid predestined, yet (such is the art) so that 
the wooing, while it thrills us, thrills with a kind of 
amaze even Prospero, its contriver. That has always 
seemed to me one of the loveliest inventions in The 
Tempest and perhaps the most glorious — the manner in 
which love takes charge of two young hearts and carries 
them ahead of its contriver, leaving him with his magic 
at a standstill. 

Great indeed is the " picture " (as I believe stage-mana- 
gers call it) in The Winter's Tale when Paulina pulls 
the curtain apart and discovers Hermione standing as a 
statue. But how much greater and more surprising, yet 
how infinitely more natural that moment of art when the 



THE TEMPEST 295 

curtains fall open at the mouth of Prospero's cave and 
reveal — two lovers playing at chess and exchanging^ — 
well, silly sooth, if we will, but true for ever and to the 
end of all things. — 

Miranda. Sweet lord, you play me false, 

Ferdinand. No, my dear'st love, 

I would not for the world. 
Mir. Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle, 

And I would call it fair play. 

There is, for the joy of the audience, a pretty grace-note 
of irony in " for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle." 
That is Shakespeare's plenty. Let us pass it and ask our- 
selves, " Was there ever, of human invention, a surprise 
more unaffected, more exquisite ? " 

(4) 

Again, I find Ferdinand superior to riorizel (though 
he has not half the time granted him) in the spirit of his 
wooing, the decisive young courage with which he ac- 
cepts menial work for the sake of winning his love. Fer- 
dinand enters carrying a log bravely; doing just the same 
labour as Caliban has been tied to — precisely the same 
labour groaning under which Caliban called, 

All the infections that the sun sucks up 

From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him 

By inch-meal a disease. 

Miranda comes forward in eager pity : 

If you'll sit down, 
I'll bear your logs the while; pray, give me that; 
I'll carry it to the pile. 



296 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Ferd. No, precious creature, 

I had rather crack my sinews, break my back. 
Than you should such dishonour undergo 
While I sit lazy by. 
Mir. It would become me 

As well as it does you; and I should do it 
With much more ease : for my good will it is, 
And yours it is against. 

So opens the most beautiful love-scene in Shakespeare: 
who, by the way (after Romeo and Juliet), was instinc- 
tively chary of love-scenes save when he could handle them 
with raillery. ITow the commentators, pondering on this 
courtship, and specially on Ferdinand's carrying logs un- 
der Prospero's harsh injunction, are all in a pother, want- 
ing to know from what source Shakespeare can have bor- 
rowed it. The trouble begins in Warton's History of 
English Poetry. Warton had been informed by " the 
late Mr. Collins of Chichester " — Collins the poet, that is 
— that Shakespeare's Tempest was based on a romance, 
Aurelio and Isabella, printed in 1586, in one volume, in 
Italian, French, and English, and again in Italian, Span- 
ish, French, and English in 1588. 

Mr. Collins had searched this subject with no less fidelity than 
judgment and industry: but his memory failing him in his last 
calamitous indisposition [poor Collins went mad, as every one 
knows] he probably gave me the name of one novel for another. I 
remember that he added a circumstance, which may lead to a dis- 
covery, that the principal character of the romance, answering to 
Shakespeare's Prospero, was a chemical necromancer, who had bound 
a spirit like Ariel to obey his call and perform his services. 

But alas! no one has ever been able to find a copy of 
this once-popular work. So the commentators turn to a 
German play, Die 8chdne Sidea, written by one Jacob 



THE TEMPEST 297 

Ayrer, a notary of JSTuremberg, who died in 1605. There 
is a magician in this drama, who is also a Prince — Prince 
Ludolph: he has a demon or familiar spirit: he has an 
only daughter too. The son of Ludolph's enemy becomes 
his prisoner, his sword being held in its sheath by the 
magician's art. Later, the young man is forced to bear 
logs for Ludolph's daughter. She falls in love with him, 
and all ends happily. " It is possible," say the most 
recent commentators — I summarise it in the words of 
Mr. Morton Luce in a very notable preface to The Tern,' 
pest in the " Arden " Shakespeare — it is possible that 
Shakespeare used Ayrer's play, for the English come- 
dians " were at N'uremberg in 1604, where they may have 
seen, and possibly themselves have acted, Die Schone 
8idea. But it is more likely that both writers derived 
the main incidents of their plots from the same hidden 
source." 

Well, there we have it — if we think it matters. But, 
to begin with, did anybody ever hear tell of a necromancer 
who had not a familiar spirit? And to proceed — Did 
anybody ever see a young commentator? Has any 
one ever met a commentator who once upon a time 
had been an infant? Did Theobald ever ride a cock- 
horse? Or was there ever a knee that dandled 
Halliwell-Phillips ? Have the commentators ever listened 
to a nursery-tale ? Or, having listened, could they 
not remember or bethink them that of nursery-tales, 
of all fairy-tales, of all folk-tales immemorially old, from 
Spain to Siberia, from China to Zululand, from the South 
Pacific to Lake Erie and back to Iceland, there is no 
cliche so common as this — the witch or wizard; the only 



298 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

daughter; the adventurous prince caught and bound to 
carry logs or sweep stables ; pity and young love that do 
the rest and bring all right in the end? It is as old as 
Hellenic mythology. Any one who lists may find it more 
than a score of times repeated in the Cabinet des Fees, 
That — and nothing less common to all mankind — is the 
basal plot of The Tempest. But we may catch stray 
echoes of it anywhere, up and down in Literature. Here 
is one, in a variant of style — 

When she is by, I leave my work, 
I love her so sincerely, 

(which is, after all, what Ferdinand does, though he says 
he is ready to crack his sinews) 

When she is by, I leave my work, 

I love her so sincerely. 
My master comes like any Turk 

And bangs me most severely — 

But let him bang his belly full, 

I'll bear it all for Sally: 
She is the darling of my heart. 

And she lives in our alley. 

(5) 

By this time the reader may pardonably have forgot- 
ten that we are making a list of stage devices common 
to The Tempest and The Winters Tale. We had, in fact, 
arrived at I^o. 7 : and I might go on with Nos. 8, 9, 10, 
11, 12 — ^mentioning, for example, that each contains a 
masque or performance in dumb show, with dancing; or 
that in both wild animals are introduced, whether real 



THE TEMPEST 299 

or personated ; or that in each there is a great recognition 
{dvayvGopiffi?) in which the long-lost are found; or that 
both are romance, and neither tragedy nor comedy; 
or I might descant on what so many have noted — the 
quiet aureate atmosphere that besets and surrounds, em- 
braces, steeps, makes its own, these two with all the later 
plays: all, but these two eminently, and with irradia- 
tion so subtle, so ethereal, so lambent, that no man can 
tell at whiles whether it be an after-glow borrowed from 
without and afar, or be rayed forth through the frame 
of the work as from an inmost altar wherefrom all smoke, 
reek, vapour of passion has been cleared and the fire has 
settled to burn with a steady heat. The light moreover is 
recognisably autumnal and yet the atmosphere breathes 
of the very dawn. 

So cool, 80 calm, so bright; 
The bridal of the earth and sky. 

Old memories of wrong; all the quarrels, jealousies, sus- 
picions, hymns of hate on which men have fed and feed 
themselves between a dream and a dream — all meet to 
be forgiven, all melt to be transformed, renewed, made 
better, all pass into a mist which, almost before we recog- 
nise it as a mist of pity, is shaken, rent, scattered by 
the morning breeze of hope. That it is to be a man and 
strong: to be wise, and overwise, and weary-wise — and 
catch your salvation in hope. 

We are such stuflF 
As dreams are made on — 

says Prosper©. But Miranda loves Ferdinand, and Eerdi- 



300 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

nand loves Miranda, and (thank God!) neither of them 
believes a word of it! 

(6) 

I hope to have convinced the reader by this time that 
The Tempest, repeating (or, since " repeating " begs the 
question, shall we say " resembling " ?) The Winter s Tale 
in at least a dozen particulars, at almost every point im- 
proves on it. Still it may be asked, " What of that ? Art- 
ists are often careless, often fall back from their best, shoot 
short after shooting furthest . . . You yourself (I may 
be reminded) have described Shakespeare in these papers 
as a royally indolent man. Granted that The Tempest 
is the better, more accomplished, work of art, it does not 
follow that it came later in time." 

And that would be rightly urged, though I hope that 
the evidence has already some cumulative effect. 

So now I will make confession of what convinces me. 
But to do this, I must in very few words re-traverse 
some ground we covered in my first paper on these later 
plays. 

Great artists tire of repeating their successes, but never 
of renewing their experiments. So, of two plays appar- 
ently built upon one theme, Othello is followed by The 
Winter's Tale, a comparative failure : so, of two upon an- 
other theme, Lear comes first in time, Cymheline second. 
And why? — precisely because Othello is an absolute ar- 
tistic success, and Lear, if not an absolute artistic suc- 
cess, is a gigantic masterpiece. The account is closed ; the 
two themes in turn, as themes, have been mastered, once 
for all. But they may yet be taken and inwoven with a 



THE TEMPEST 301 

third theme, truer in the end than either. Thus Shake- 
speare goes on ; and if any one choose to say that in Cym- 
beline and The Winter's Tale he falls, why, then, let us 
grant that he falls. But he falls by no intellectual decline : 
rather in the attempt to achieve something further, cer- 
tainly more difficult and, it may even be, impossible. It 
is with Art as with Love — and these are the twin passions 
that tear and rend every artist's life. — 

Love wing'd my Hopes and taught me how to ffy 
Far from base earth, but not to mount too high: 

For true pleasure 

Lives in measure, 

Which if men forsake. 
Blind they into folly run and grief for pleasure take. 

But my vain Hopes, proud of their new-taught flight, 
Enamour'd sought to woo the sun's fair light; 

Whose rich brightness 

Moved their lightness 

To aspire so high. 
That all scorch'd and consum'd with fire, now drown'd in woe 
they lie. 

And none but Love their woeful hap did rue : 
For Love did know that their desires were true. 

Though fate frowned, 

And now drowned 

They in sorrow dwell. 
It was the purest light of Heaven for whose fair love they fell. 

(7) 

What was this new theme which Shakespeare sought to 
engraft upon his old ones? We know it already. We 
have followed it through Pericles, through Cymheline, 
through The Winter s Tale, here to The Tempest. It is 
Reconciliation. Desdemona sacrificed, dead by her pil- 
low: Cordelia limp in Lear's arms — 



302 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Thou'lt come no more, 
Never, never, never, never, never! 

That cannot be the end of it all ! " Naj," you hear 
Shakespeare say, " if I were God now ..." (For an- 
thropomorphism, whether we pity or mock it, is not wholly 
base.) " But," says he, " I am Shakespeare and feel my- 
self a god, being able to create some few things. Then 
this shall not be the end ! There may or may not be an- 
other world in which wrongs are redressed. But there 
is a continuance of this world in newer generations that we 
surmise — how wistfully!" "You promise heavens free 
from strife," but " this warm, kind world is all I know " : 
" and in it," he says, " as I am Shakespeare, Desdemona's 
fate and Cordelia's shall not be the last word, and the 
sins of the fathers shall not be visited on the children." 

And so we have Marina, Perdita, Miranda created for 
us: creatures of loveliness made to love and to conceive 
children, renewing the promise of the world. 

(8) 

Just here, however, comes in the dramatist's difficulty. 
Shakespeare is henceforth occupied, and to the end, with 
reconciliation. But (as I have pointed out) reconcilia- 
tion, forgiveness, the adjustment and restoration of good- 
will between injured and injurer must be, in the nature of 
things, a slow process. And this, of all themes, is the most 
heartbreaking for a dramatist, who has to tell, and by 
presented action, his complete story in two or three hours. 
Again and again this difficulty beat Shakespeare; and on 
our way through the later plays we have seen the devices 
by which he covered defeat. In Pericles we had ancient 



THE TEMPEST 303 

Gower acting Prologue, quite in the fashion of those old 

pensioners who in some great houses trot a sight-seer 

around the picture-galleries. We listen to him begging us, 

in Act after Act, to suppose that so much time has 

elapsed. — 

I do beseech you 
To learn of me, who stand in the gaps to teach you 
The stages of our story. 

In The Winter s Tale between Acts iii and iv we have 
Father Time himself, dragged in by the forelock, or beard, 
exhibit an hour-glass and plead — 

Impute it not a crime 
To me on my swift passage that I slide 
O'er sixteen years and leave the growth untried 
Of that wide gap. 

And then, of a sudden, in The Tempest Shakespeare 
brings off the trick! The whole action of the play, with 
the whole tale of ancient wrong unfolded, the whole com- 
pany of injuring and injured gathered into a knot, the 
whole machinery of revenge turned to forgiveness, takes 
place in about three hours of imagined time, or scarcely 
less than the time of its actual representation on the stage ! 
" Marvellous stagecraft ! " ? Yes. I would not make 
too much of the famous Unities: but though discredited 
as laws, they abide as graces of drama ; and pre-eminently 
a grace is this Unity of Time, whereby the author, in Dry- 
den's words — 

sets the audience, as it were, at the post where the race is to be 
concluded; and, saving them the tedious expectation of seeing the 
poet set out and ride the beginning of the course, suffers you not to 
behold him till he is in sight of goal and just upon you. 



304. SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

" Marvellous " ? Yes . . . But will any one tell me 
that Shakespeare, having solved the problem which had 
beaten him — ^great master of his craft — not once only but 
thrice, turned back afterwards to imitate, in The Witi- 
ter's Tale, old failures? 

Such a thing does not happen. 

Here I take leave to speak positively. We must all 
bring our small private experiences to the task of inter- 
preting our Shakespeare. He is so truly a child of Na- 
ture, and so wise in her, 1 at we feel we owe him that 
service hardly less than we we it to ISTature herself: we 
read him, reading ourselvf into him. — 

O Lady! we receive but what we give, 
And in our life alone does Nature live: 
Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud. 

And just here any man who has seriously devoted his 
days, or the best of them, to inventive art — no matter 
how feeble the result — can stand up without false mod- 
esty and speak with more authority than any commenta- 
tor who, learned as we please in other things, has never 
been baptised, never initiated, never made one of the 
cult. An artist may — I think the greatest do, and must 
— care little for what he has done: as Shakespeare, 
we know, took no further care for a play once written. 
As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello — he tosses them over his 
broad shoulder, and whoso list may pick them up. But 
he — the artist — passes on to some new strange search: 
and of its object we divine nothing nor know more than 
this — that, until found, it is the essential jewel of his 
soul. 



THE TEMPEST 305 

A friend, the other day, called my attention to a note — 
a memorandum — by the late Dr. Eurnivall: 

When I asked Browning what struck him most in Shakespeare, he 
said, " The royal ease with which he walks up the steps and takes his 
seat on the throne, while we poor fellows have to struggle hard to 
get up a step or two." 

If ever a man in invention displayed that royal ease, yes, 
certainly it was Shakespeare. All his contemporaries bear 
testimony to this that Browning noted. If in any one 
play he steps to his throne iore eminently a king than 
in all the rest, that play is T Tempest. But in previous 
papers I have tried to anatc iise the artist that goes up 
— ^yes, so royally — ^to his platform to draw the curtain 
for the last time ; and I think of Arnold's lines — 

These things, Ulysses, 
The wise bards also 
Behold and sing. 
But 0, what labour! 
O Prince, what pain ! 

and of these other lines of Arnold's — 

Such, Poets, is your bride, the Muse ! Young, gay. 
Radiant adorn'd outside: a hidden ground 
Of thought and of austerity within. 



CHAPTER XVII 
THE TEMPEST 

III 

Argument for The Tempest being a marriage play — ^Its position in 
the Folio — An imagined first night — The uses of the inner stage — 
The realistic accuracy of the opening scene — Landlubber criticisms — 
Coleridge on Prospero's " retrospective narration " — The dignity of 
Perdita and Miranda — Shakespeare's sympathy extending to Caliban 
— The contribution of Stephano — Comparison of The Tempest and 
A Midsummer-Night's Dream — Prospero — Danger of supposing auto- 
biography — ^A play for all time. 

(1) 

'Although, as we have seen in a previous chapter, The 
Tempest was pretty certainly presented at Court, in some 
form or another, on Hallowmas ITight, 1611, it was quite 
certainly represented there early in 1613 to grace the 
nuptials of the Prince Palatine and the Princess Eliza- 
beth, and almost as certainly played as we now have it, 
whether there had been a previous form or not. For 
while it seems we must reject Dr. Garnett's main thesis, 
that Shakespeare wrote it for that great occasion, I hold 
this much proved all but unanswerably. — As it now 
stands, it was written for Court, and to celebrate a wed- 
ding. I am even inclined to add " a royal wedding." Its 
brevity (for a monarch and his guests must not be un- 
duly tired, nor a bridal couple either) is one small indica- 
tion. Its economy of scene-shifting, unique among Shake- 
speare's plays, is another and stronger one : and by a para- 

306 



THE TEMPEST 307 

dox, the stationary splendour of its setting, a third. For 
it is observable that while a Rojal Banqueting House, 
such as that of Whitehall, allows a more sumptuous frame 
than an ordinary theatre ; and while for a royal perform- 
ance it encourages rich dress in the players, with refine- 
ment of bodily motion and the speaking voice ; and while 
again it lends itself, as we know, to all the apparatus of 
a Masque; it cannot — it could not then, as Windsor can 
not to-day — compete with a professional theatre in what 
we may call the tricks of the trade. When at Whitehall 
or at Windsor we come to these, we come, if not to " two 
trestles and a board," at furthest to something like a glori- 
fied Assembly-Room. 

iN'ow, as Dr. Garnett has pointed out, " after the first 
brief representation of the deck of the storm-tossed ves- 
sel with which the play opens, there is practically but 
one scene. For though the action occasionally shifts from 
the space before Prosperous cell to some other part of the 
island, everything is avoided which might necessitate 
a change of decoration. ISTeither is there any change 
of costume except Prospero's assumption of his ducal 
robes in the last Act: and this takes place on the 
stage." 

But of course Dr. Garnett's argument rests mainly on 
the two masques, and specially on the nuptial masque 
of Iris, Ceres, and Juno: which, if the real purpose of 
the play — or as I should prefer to put it, the occasional 
purpose — ^be overlooked, appears so merely an excrescence 
that some have hastily supposed it an interpolation. But 
this cannot be. If we remove the masque. Act iv (al- 
ready, as it stands, much shorter than ordinary) simply 



308 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

crumbles to pieces; while further, as we saw in our first 
paper, the finest passage in the drama goes with it. For 
the text runs — not as so often misquoted — 



And like the baseless fabric of a vision, 



And like the baseless fabric of this vision; 



but 

and again * 

And like this unsubstantial pageant, faded. 
Leave not a wrack behind. 

On the other hand, if we save the masque (and Act iv 
along with it), we cannot deny it to be a nuptial one. 
It explicitly says that it is. 

Thus far I have been following Dr. Garnett : and will 
but add two small points which seem to me to strengthen 
his contention. — 

(1) The resemblance, subtler for its differences but 
not less assured, between The Tempest and A Mid- 
summer-Night's Dream — a play undoubtedly writ- 
ten for Court and a wedding. With this I will deal 
by-and-by, when we come to Ariel and fairyland. 

(2) The place of The Tempest in the First Folio. 
Heminge and Condell knew, of course, that it was 
not his first play, but almost his last, if not (as I 
maintain) his very last. Then why did they lead off 
with it ? Putting aside the hypothesis that by divina- 
tion they set it there as the play of all others calcu- 
lated to allure every child for a hundred generations 
to come into his Shakespeare, to be entrapped by 
its magic, I suggest that, being cunning men, they 



THE TEMPEST 309 

started off upon the public with their revered dead 
master's most notorious triumph; that this triumph 
had owed no little of its notoriety on the one hand 
to having fulfilled a great occasion — ^the Lady Eliza- 
beth's spousals — that set all England afire; on the 
other to Court approbation ; which, even in our days, 
the ' profession ' (and Heminge and Condell were 
actors) has been known to appreciate. 

(2) 

The date is an early night of 1613, when the days 
are felt to be lengthening. At Whitehall the Great 
Banqueting House is alight, and, for the mirrors to 
multiply, the tall candles shine on a company of men 
and women whose rivalry, to the soul's neglect, in every 
trapping that will give the body splendour, as in every 
luxury that can minister to its inward appetite, has al- 
ready made the Court of James I a byword in Europe 
for prodigality; for the moment to be envied or fore- 
boded on as a sensual or as a spiritual man will choose. 
They have their hour, at any rate; and we may, if we 
will, amuse ourselves by essaying to reconstruct the scene 
in detail after the fashion of Macaulay. — Here the King 
himself seated, there Cecil, now Earl of Salisbury, grave, 
sedate; there, made heir-apparent but a few weeks ago 
by the death of his brother Henry, the boy Charles who 
in time must step out from a window of this same banquet- 
ing-room and lay his head on the block to pay for it all, 

While, round, the arm&d bands 
Did clap their bloody hands. — 



310 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

(for the more we study causes the clearer we see that the 
Great Rebellion really sprang from the Stuarts' congeni- 
tal nescience of any obligation in dealing with public 
money) . 

. . . And there young George Villiers, and there young 
Edward Herbert (later of Cherbury), gay as flies; and 
there my Lady Harrington and Lady Grace Dudley ; there 
Erancis Bacon, knight and Solicitor General; knowing 
most things but little guessing that in course of time 
he would be accused of having come to witness his own 
play . . . We all remember the trick of it, and can 
refresh our memories by turning to the famous passage 
in which Macaulay arrays Westminster Hall for the trial 
of Warren Hastings. 

But, seriously, I suggest that in visualising a play which 
so tenderly yet imperatively dismisses this transitory life 
of ours as such stuff as dreams are made on — a tale 
rounded by a sleep — we may profitably see it at the double 
remove; conjuring up, between us and the stage, all that 
brilliant company in the auditorium, — ^now, with all the 
players, dead and gone almost as if they had never been: 
and especially that one girl in whose honour all is de- 
vised, Elizabeth, bride and ' Queen of Hearts.' A pas- 
sage of Hazlitt's haunts me as I think of it. — 

We walk through life, as through a narrow path, with a thin 
curtain drawn around it; behind are ranged rich portraits, airy 
harps are strung — ^yet we will not stretch forth our hands and lift 
aside the veil, to catch glimpses of the one or sweep the chords of the 
other. As in a theatre, when the old-fashioned green curtain drew 
up, groups of figures, fantastic dresses, laughing faces, rich banquets, 
stately columns, gleaming vistas appeared beyond; so we have only 
at any time to " peep through the blanket of the past," to possess 
ourselves at once of all that has regaled our senses, that is stored 



THE TEMPEST 311 

up in our memory, that has struck our fancy, that has pierced our 
hearts. . . . 

So, for me, two curtains rise on The Tempest. First, be- 
tween me and the stage I see that company gathered: 
and, pre-eminent, in the front row, the figure of this girl, 
this paragon, " th' eclipse and glory of her kind," for 
whose sake so many gallant gentlemen were to lose this 
world and count it gain. 

See the chariot at hand here of Love 

Wherein my Lady rideth! 
Each that draws is a swan or a dove. 

And well the car Love guideth. 
As she goes, all hearts do duty 

Unto her beauty; 
And enamour'd do wish so they might 

But enjoy such a sight. 
That they still were to nm by her side 
Thro' swords, thro' seas, whither she would ride. 

To-night she is a bride; as the histories attest, in love 
with her husband; and if we can hereafter, between 
whiles, steal an instant from Miranda and Ferdinand, let 
it be for her face, with lips parted as she leans forward 
and her heart goes out to follow the lovers' story. But 
for the moment I see her, a little reclined, her young 
jewelled wrists, like Cassiopeia's, laid along the arms of 
her chair; and, before her, that other curtain. 

(3) 

In the public theatres of that time, the main stage 
was uncurtained, and its front ran boldly out into 
the auditorium. Now I think that in the Banqueting 
House at Whitehall that front was flattened back so as 



312 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

to be almost, if not quite, straight ; and that this strange 
proscenium very likely had a frontal curtain. But this 
matters little; for, like every Elizabethan theatre, public 
or private, the Banqueting House had an inner stage, 
and that of course had curtains. We have seen to what 
uses this second, inner, stage lent itself. It served as 
Juliet's tomb, and Hero's ; for Hermione on her pedestal ; 
for the play-scene in Hamlet; for Richard's tent; for 
Desdemona's bedchamber and Imogen's; for Imogen's 
cave, too, and Timon's, and, in this play, Prospero's. We 
know that, since its curtains could be opened or shut at 
will, properties could be shifted behind them, and there- 
fore whenever in an Elizabethan play we come on a scene 
that demands a certain amount of stage upholstery we 
may at once be sure that it was erected on the inner stage. 
In The Tempest this inner stage serves three purposes. 
It serves — 

(1) for Prospero's cave, 

(2) for the masque of Ceres and Juno (a scene 
within a scene), 

and (3) lastly for what comes first — ^the shipwreck 
itself; since to present the deck of a ship in a gale 
many ' properties ' are required : the foot of a mast, 
at least, some leading ropes, and running gear, odd 
cordage, raffle, spars, deck-hamper broken adrift; 
with lightning and thunder produced from the wings 
and the ' flies.' You cannot call your deck-hands up 
on to a naked stage, and set them to run about haul- 
ing on ropes which are not there and howling to imi- 
tate a gale. Eor properties on the outer stage, read- 
ing the play, I can find no more necessary to be pro- 



THE TEMPEST 313 

vided than two chairs and a clothes-line, all in 
Act iv. 

(4) 

So, to a bang and a rolling roar of thunder, the inner 
curtains fall open, and we are shown — out at sea beyond 
the island — the deck of a long-laboured ship: men run- 
ning, shouting, cursing; master and bo'sun bawling or- 
ders; canvas banging with loud reports, wind whistling, 
lightning and St. Elmo's light, and all that a competent 
stage-manager can adventitiously supply from the wings. 

This opening scene has been criticised: but my poor 
nautical knowledge applauds it for a first-class gale. Of 
course ships are built on improved designs and can lie 
nowadays several points closer up to the wind: but even 
nowadays, caught, as Alonzo's crew were, full on a lee- 
shore, a man must trim his judgment to the force of the 
wind and what is called the ' scend ' of the sea. This 
in shoaling water heaves your vessel shoreward all the 
while. Then, if your judgment tells you that your upper 
masts will carry the weight, you may claw off by piling 
on canvas and driving her : and it will be the bolder, hap- 
pier chance that naturally tempts you. But with the gale 
beyond a certain force — and Prospero was not conjuring 
by halves — ^you have to reckon if your spars are man 
enough for it; and if in your judgment they are not, 
then to down their canvas, " try her with main course " 
as the Bo'sun does in seamanlike fashion, and ride to it — 
even lowering the upper spars themselves — as could be 
readily done in an Elizabethan ship — and so ease her 
drifting to leeward : for aloft, now, they are so much use- 



314 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

less cumber and hold tlie wind. We have to remember, 
too, that with an Elizabethan ship this moment for decid- 
ing on the second-best would necessarily come sooner than 
on a modern one. She was good enough in any sea-room. 
" Blow, till thou burst thy wind," the Bo'sun challenges 
heaven, '' if there he room enough/^ But this is just 
the point. He has no fear of her in seaworthiness, but 
of her capacity to nose off a coast. 

In short, the storm is a good storm, and the master 
handles his vessel well, giving the right orders sharp and 
prompt. The critics criticise more plausibly when they 
come to the actual wreck. Eor Scene 1 ends on the cry, 
" We split, we split, we split ! " as if she were actually on 
the rocks and striking. In Scene 2 Miranda at first con- 
firms this. She has seen 

a brave vessel, 
Who had, no doubt, some noble creatures in her, 
Dash'd all to pieces. 

She hears the cry of the crew. 

O, that cry did knock 
Against my very heart! 

She sees them suffer. Yet later on she appears to have 
seen the ship founder — a very different thing; and yet 
again we have a description of Ferdinand's swimming 
for shore and beating the surges under him ; and by this 
time we know from Ariel that there has been no real 
striking or foundering. — 

Safely in harbour 
Is the king's ship; in the deep nook where once 
Thou call'dst me up at midnight to fetch dew 



THE TEMPEST 315 

From the still-vex'd Bermoothes, there she's hid: 
The mariners all under hatches stow'd; 
Who, with a charm join'd to their suffer'd labour, 
I have left asleep. 

But, to be sure, I make very little of these supposed 
inconsistencies. It is surely not difficult, when we have 
listened to Ariel — 

I boarded the king's ship ; now on the beak. 
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin, 
I flam'd amazement: sometimes I'ld divide 
And burn in many places; on the topmast. 
The yards and bowsprit would I flame distinctly, 
Then meet and join. Jove's lightnings, the precursors 
O' the dreadful thunder-claps, more momentary 
And sight-outrunning were not: the fire and cracks 
Of sulphurous roaring the most mighty Neptune 
Seem to besiege, and make his bold waves tremble — 
Yea, his dread trident shake. 

and again — 

All but mariners 
Plung'd in the foaming brine and quit the vessel, 
Then all afire with me. 

— it is surely not difficult, remembering this to be a fairy 
coast and the conjured storm mixed with illusions, to 
reconcile the discrepancies. As for Miranda's account of 
it — well, I have seen two or three wrecks and come near 
sharing in one, and I do not want to see another. But 
whereas in one I have seen a ship strike and visibly go to 
pieces in three successive waves (the masts falling to- 
gether like sticks of barley-sugar — all crumbled and gone 
in some fifteen or twenty seconds), in another it hap- 
pened very much as Miranda saw it — a ship, a squall 
that blotted out everything, then a clear horizon again, 



316 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

but no ship. That was a small craft, almost a boat. But 
we have all heard tell how the Eurydice went down, rac- 
ing up past the ^Needles with her gun-ports open, close 
to home. To those watching her from the cliffs the squall 
blotted her out, passed in less than a minute, and, where 
she had been, nothing but the waves ran. Such an in- 
terval would leave Ariel time for all his beneficent 
conjuring. 

(5) 

The play has advertised itself as The Tempest, and in 
the very first Scene we are already in a first-class tempest. 
But patently this sort of thing cannot go on through the 
five Acts to come. 

Well, of course it cannot: but now let the reader 
consider the craft of the opening Scene, in the light 
of a First Principle which I will set in italics. — 
// you are an artist and are setting out to tell the in^- 
credible, nothing will serve you so well as to open with 
absolute realism. If you want, for instance, to tell the 
incredible story of Robinson Crusoe, you put your hands 
in your pocket and begin — 

" I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good 
family though not of that county; my father being a foreigner of 
Bremen, who settled in Hull." 

So, if you want to tell how Alice met with the most im- 
possible adventures, you give the child an ordinary kit- 
ten, set her on a hearth-rug in an ordinary room, take 
her to an ordinary looking-glass and walk her through it. 
So the trick is done: and so, past the realistic shoutings 
and cursings of our Bo'sun — past the realistic trepidation 



THE TEMPEST 317 

and runnings to-and-fro of our passengers — ^we come to 
shore on the island, and 

The rarity of it is — ^which is indeed almost beyond credit — that 
our garments, being, as they were, drenched in the sea, hold, not- 
withstanding, their freshness and glosses, being rather new dyed 
than stained with salt water. 

To the extreme technical skill of the second Scene, the 
wonderful protasis between Prospero and his daughter, 
which unfolds — better, I dare to say, than any prologue 
of Greek Tragedy, because more naturally and pat on 
the moment of occasion — every item preparative to what 
follows, every word instructing us while it intrigues 
and enchances our curiosity, several critics have paid 
tribute. I certainly cannot improve on Coleridge's — 

In the second scene Prospero's speeches, till the entrance of Ariel, 
contain the finest example I remember of retrospective narration 
for the purpose of exciting immediate interest and putting the 
audience in possession of all the information necessary for the 
understanding of the plot. Observe, too, the perfect probability of 
the moment chosen by Prospero ... to open out the truth to his 
daughter, his own romantic bearing, and how completely everything 
that might have been disagreeable to us in the magician is reconciled 
and shaded in the humanity and natural feelings of a father. In 
the very first speech of Miranda the simplicity and tenderness of 
her character are at once laid open. . . . 

That speech, as you remember, touches for a moment 
on reproach, to slide off into a pity which for us and for 
Prospero is innocent-stabbing iron — all the more deadly 
for being gentle and simple and direct. — 

If by your art, my dearest father, you have 
Put the wild waters in a roar, allay them. . . . 
O, I have suflfer'd 



318 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

With those that I saw suffer! A brave vessel. 
Who had, no doubt, some noble creatures in her, 
Dash'd all to pieces. O, the cry did break 
Against my very heart! Poor souls, they perish'd. 
Had / been any god of power, I would 
Have sunk the sea within the earth, or ere 
It should the good ship so have swallow'd and 
The fraughting souls within her. 



(6> 

ITow for Miranda. — Every critic wants to write about 
her ; but when we are all in love, what is the use ? Spe- 
cially and rightly they have noticed the chosen distance at 
which she is poised between the brute Caliban and the 
rarefied Ariel with his fellow-spirits haunting that isle of 
voices: she so straight, forthright, speaking out all her 
knowledge, though it be bluntly, laying her heart bare 
to the first summons of love — so confidently, being 
clean. 

I will but add this. Through these later plays we can- 
not but note that Shakespeare, choosing a maiden for the 
central figure of each successive work, successively sub- 
limates his conception of maidenhood until towards the 
end no one is fit to act Marina, Perdita, Miranda, unless 
she be actually a princess or fit to be a princess. I dare- 
say that I love Beatrice or Rosalind as whole-heartedly 
as any one who may happen to read this page. But 
they are different. One can imagine a Beatrice or a Rosa- 
lind enacted with just a touch of vulgarity and yet with- 
out offence. But in Perdita or in Miranda that touch 
were inconceivable. 

Et vera incessu patuit dea. 



THE TEMPEST 319 

And (wonder of all!) this man, suborned to the stage of 
his time, making himself " a motley to the view/' had to 
write the parts of Perdita and Miranda to be acted by 
boys! There — ^just there — his genius, which has lured 
me since childhood on the quest, adventurous though vain, 
to track its secret down — just there that wonder, which 
is the voice and harp of Ariel, vanishes and leaves me 
hopelessly foundered: even as this sort of thing drives 
us to go hackneying the hackneyed encomium, the full 
meaning of which, when he wrote it, Ben Jonson never 
guessed. 

He was not of an age, but for all time — 

This should keep us wary, when we deal with Shake- 
speare, of testing the workman too narrowly by the con- 
ditions of his craft. I may be accused of being proner 
than most to fall into this very sin. So let me admit 
that, while it seems to me constantly useful, and some- 
times illuminating, to have those conditions in mind, it 
is a folly to think of Shakespeare as limited by them. He 
invented Lady Macbeth and Miranda, and both to be 
acted by boys! 

(7) 

I shall say little more of Miranda: because in two 
immortal pages Coleridge has condensed all, or almost all, 
that can be said. I believe that before reading him, and 
therefore without his help, I had felt the exquisite touches 
(there are two) when Miranda in the first dawn of love 
lets slip from memory first her father's behest and anon 
his precepts — " Thou sJialt leave father and mother and 



320 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

cleave" etc. But it was Coleridge taught me the 
beauty of — 

At the first sight 
They have chang'd eyes. 

— which does not mean " they have exchanged glances " 
but with literal truth indicates the decisive moment that 
happens in true love between man and woman. 

But specially I would refer to words in which, specially 
of Miranda, Coleridge expresses just this that we all feel 
of her. — 

In Shakespeare all the elements of womanhood are holy, and there 
is the sweet yet dignified feeling of all that continuates society, a 
sense of ancestry and of sex, with a purity unassailable by sophistry, 
because it rests not in the analytical processes but in that sane 
equipoise of the faculties during which the feelings are representative 
of all past experience — not of the individual only, but of all those by 
whom she had been educated, and their predecessors even up to the 
first mother that lived. 

I will add but this concerning her — yet I think it her 

last secret and the last secret of the play: — She is good. 

It has been pointed out that, of all the courtiers wrecked 

on the island, Gonzalo is the only good man, and he alone 

of them keeps his cheerfulness, his happy old courage. 

So, and more eminently, Miranda is good: she means 

nothing but good to the world and in return will credit 

it only with good — 

O brave new world! 
That has such people in it! 

And so we behold her — a being good absolutely and by 
breeding, set above commerce and fear — how fearlessly 



THE TEMPEST 321 

she gives iherself in that incomparable love-scene with 
which Act iii opens I 
Says Ferdinand: 

Wherefore weep you? 
Mir. At my unworthiness, that dare not offer 
What I desire to give; and much less take 
What I should die to want. But this is trifling; 
And all the more it seeks to hide itself. 
The bigger bulk it shows. Hence, bashful cunning! 
And prompt me, plain and holy innocence! 
I am your wife, if you will marry me; 
If not, I'll die your maid : to be your fellow 
You may deny me : but I'll be your servant 
Whether you will or no. 

Fer. {Aa he kneels) My mistress, dearest; 

And I thus humble ever. 
Mir. My husband, then? 

Fer. Ay, with a heart as willing 

As bondage e'er of freedom. Here's my hand. 
Mir. And mine, with my heart in't. 

(8) 

Many critics have pointed out as a point of artistry how 
delicately Shakespeare has set Miranda, clean of mind 
as of body of lively flesh and blood, on the balance be- 
tween her father's two ministrants: Caliban, of the earth 
earthly, and Ariel, rarefied almost to a mere spirit of the 
sky, often a mere voice on the breeze: and we have just 
noted how much better she is than either. 

ISTow of Caliban I shall say (for in my opinion the mon- 
ster has been rather monstrously over-philosophised) only 
this — that somehow he is not a bad monster. It may seem 
unfair to drag Falstaff into a comparison; but the worst 
I want to make of it is that our full-blooded Shake- 



322 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

speare, having set himself to create something gross, sen- 
sual, could never help sympathising with it, liking it, in 
a sense loving it. Even as none of us can help loving Eal- 
staff, so if Caliban were to come fawning into the room, 
my impulse would be to pat him on the head — " Good old 
doggie ! Good monster ! " — that would be the feeling. To 
be sure he is a ' waster ' in any decent scheme of society ; 
fruges consumere natus. In his second remark (the first 
is occupied with cursing) he reveals himself as shame- 
lessly as might a crowned head of Europe — 

/ must eat my dinner: 
This island's mine! 

— while, for his uncouthness of speech, I cannot help feel- 
ing that he gets back something of his own when he an- 
swers Prospero — 

You taught me language, and my profit on't 
Is, I know how to curse. 

But on this Dr. Johnson has an exceedingly sensible 
remark : 

Caliban had learned to speak of Prospero and his daughter; lie 
had no names for the sun and moon before their arrival; and could 
not have invented a language of his own without more understand- 
ing than Shakespeare has thought fit to bestow on him. His diction 
is indeed clouded by the gloominess of his temper and the malignity 
of his purposes : but let any other being entertain the same thoughts, 
and he will find them easily issue in the same expressions. 

Here, for convenience, let me take Caliban's compan- 
ions and co-plotters. Trineulo the jester is adequate and 
makes a good foil: but he makes little more; nor, do I 
think, did Shakespeare desire to do any more ; having done 



THE TEMPEST 323 

his last and worst with jesters. For we think of the plays 
chronologically now: and for me Shakespeare should 
never write of a Fool again after the Fool in Lear. To 
have let that brave heart — the bravest ii\ the tragedy, 
wherein, outcast for loyalty yet strong and alone, it helps 
its master through agony, and will draw a gay, courageous 
laugh from its worst twinges — to have let that heart go, 
without even remembering to kill it, allowing it not even 
the dignity to break in honourable discharge — to have let 
it pass without recognition, naked, nameless, out into the 
wind and the night — Well, Shakespeare was often care- 
less, but in this he was cruel, criminal. I do not want 
any more Fools of Shakespeare after the Fool in Lear. 

But Trinculo's recognition scene with Stephano (Cali- 
ban being used in it with the funniest plausibility) makes 
capital farce, and Stephano himself is, I dare to say, a 
master stroke of invention, I may be thought to speak 
extravagantly here, for his share in the action is not of 
first-rate importance : but let us consider his value in con- 
1 tributing solidarity to our trust in a play which through- 
out the artist had to watch against its becoming too 
ethereal, too pure and good 

for human nature's daily food, 

and floating off into sheer phantasy. But an unmistak- 
able British seaman turned loose to stagger through our 
isle of magic, with a bottle! — The scheme wanted but 
that: a priceless British mariner, staggering through all 
but to stare, and against Ariel's fine-drawn melodies hic- 
coughing back — 

The master, the swabber, the bo'sun, and I . . . 



324 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Truly I see the beginnings of what they call " our world- 
wide empire " in Stephano. Let the reader mistake me 
not: I see them also in Andrew Marvell's mariners, row- 
ing, " where the remote Bermudas ride," and chanting 

In the English boat 
A holy and a cheerful note. 

But I detect them also in this unholier drunken figure, 
bewildered, yet positive that all is to be risked. — 

I escaped upon a butt of sack, which the sailors heaved o'erboard. 
. . . Tell not me! When the butt is out we will drink water: not 
a drop before. 

That, with his immortal advice in extremity, " Every 
man shift for all the rest," gives the man's measure. 

(9) 

In a previous chapter, on A Midsummer-NigJifs Dream, 
I said something of Shakespeare's Fairies. If we read 
that play alongside The Tempest, we cannot miss, while 
acknowledging that all has changed in Fairyland, to be 
surprised, and almost with a shock, by a crowd of similari- 
ties. Shakespeare, as I cannot too often insist, never 
tired of repeating himself, of trying old inventions, with 
a difference, to produce new effects. But whereas in 
Twelfth Night, for example (last of the gay comedies), 
we see As You Like It, Much Ado, the first part of Henry 
IV translated into a pale lunar haze, in The Tempest we 
see the fairyland of A Midsummer-Night's Dream con- 
verted to quite other effect: rarefied, and made thereby 
not less potent but more potent. 



THE TEMPEST 325 

(1) Both plays include a bridal interlude: and both 
as they stand were (I am sure) designed to celebrate 
a Court wedding. 

(2) Both catch away this world to entangle it in en- 
chantment by faery. 

(3) Both are noticeably short (A Midsummer-Night's 
Dream 2,250 lines, The Tempest but 2,068 lines), 
and near together in length. 

(4) Of all the plays these two most constantly invoke 
and rely on music. Nor can any other play compete 
with these two in the number of passages that com- 
posers have set to music. 

Here, by the way, let us note the touch of poetry in 
Prospero's demand for music as he prepares to break his 
staff — 

And when I have requir'd 
Some heavenly music — which even now I do — 

He says it is to charm the senses of Ferdinand and Mi- 
randa, but a few lines later he says it is to cure the un- 
settled fancy of Alonzo and his courtiers; and I rather 
like to think he invokes it for his own passing. I like 
to read in it the demand expressed in Sully-Prudhomme's 
lines, thus translated by George du Maurier — 

Kindly watcher by my bed, lift no voice in prayer. 
Waste not any words on me when the hour is nigh. 
Let a stream of melody but flow from one sweet player. 
And meekly will I lay my head, and fold my hands to die. 

Sick am I of idle words, past all reconciling. 
Words that weary and perplex and pander and conceal, 
Wake the sounds that cannot lie, for all their sweet beguiling, 
The language one need fathom not, but only hear and feel. 



326 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Let them roll once more to me, and ripple in my hearing, 
Like waves upon a lonely beach where no craft anchoreth; 
That I may steep my soul therein, and craving naught nor fearing, 
Drift on through slumber to a dream, and through a dream to 
death. 



(5) Let US next note as a fact highly curious, but 
abundantly proved by experience, that of all Shake- 
speare's plays these two require to be acted by (shall 
I say?) amateurs. The amateur may miss or hit. 
The professional mummer has never made any hand 
"with either play; nor (I think) ever will. 

(6) In neither play — and in this again the pair stand 
alone (if we omit Timon of Athens) — is there any 
real plot to concern any one. The story " dies in 
the telling." 

(7) In both the lowlier characters — Caliban and 
Company as well as Bully Bottom and Company — 
get ludicrously mixed in the enchantment. 

— and so on. Many critics have saved me the trouble of 
indicating how much more ethereal, yet withal how much 
wiser, is this last fairyland of The Tempest than that of 
Robin Goodfellow, Pease-blossom, Mustard-seed, and the 
rest — those rustic Warwickshire elves. I think it more 
useful, perhaps, to point out how curiously and — despite 
all the intervening years and for all Shakespeare had 
learnt in them — how hauntingly alike is the language. 



And never since the middle summer's spring 

Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead. 

By pav6d fountain or by rushy brook, 

Or in the beached margent of the sea. 

To dance our ringlets in the whistling wind. . . . 

(M. 2V. D., II, i, 82.) 



THE TEMPEST 327 

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves, 
And ye that on the sands with printless foot 
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him 
When he comes back. . . . 

{Tempest, V, i, 33.) 

Come unto these yellow sands. 

And then take hands: 
Curtsied when you have and kiss'd — 

The wild waves whist. . . . 

{lUd., I, ii, 376.) 

Those echoes — " Hark ! now we hear them — Ding-dong, 
bell " ! But technically, as a matter of structural work- 
manship, the difference lies in this, that whereas in A 
Midsummer-Night's Dream the fairy element runs free, 
to play its own irresponsible mischief, in The Tempest it 
works entirely at the behest — and, even when mutinous, 
strictly under the control — of one human mind. 

(10) 

So I come lastly to Prospero. Who is Prospero? Is 
he perchance Destiny itself; the master-spirit that has 
brooded invisible and moved on the deep waters of all the 
Tragedies, and now comes to shore on a lost islet of the 
main to sun himself, laying by his robe of darkness to 
play, at his great ease, one last smiling trick before 
taking his rest ? Yes, spirit, 

thou comest from thy voyage: 
Yes, the spray is on thy cloak and hair. 

Or is he, as so many of us have pleased ourselves to fancy, 
Shakespeare himself, breaking his wand, drowning his 
book, and so bidding farewell? Or is he, perchance, as 



328 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

the late Dr. Garnett preferred to conjecture — James I 
of England ? If so, in the words of the Preface to the 
Authorised Version, " Great and manifold were the bless- 
ings, most dread Sovereign, which Almighty God the 
Father of all mercies bestowed upon us the people of Eng- 
land, when first he sent Your Majesty's Royal Person 
to rule and reign over us " ! But — ^to take this conjec- 
ture first — it has been observed, not without sagacity, that 
to flatter the royal and learned author of Demonologie by 
presenting him to himself in the guise of a sorcerer were 
a proposal beyond even Shakespeare's courage — to say 
nothing of his tact. And even for the rest, let us ever 
beware how we say of any imaginative author that (as the 
phrase goes) he " has put So-and-so into his book." 
Dickens, to be sure, did it once or twice — not nearly so 
often as some folk suppose, but still once or twice or 
thrice — with unhappy result. For in truth it is not the 
way of the imaginative artist : and if the reader will not 
take that from me he may take it from Aristotle. Poetry 
never works on photographs, but on hints; never on 
persons, individuals, save in one way which Sir John 
Davies told, three centuries ago, in verse for us — 

From their gross matter she abstracts their forms, 
And draws a kind of quintessence from things; 

Which to her proper nature she transforms 
To bear them, light, on her celestial wings. 

And so, by this very virtue of Universality, The Tempest 
is — ^what you or I make of it; Prospero — what you or I 
make of him. " O Lady ! we receive but what we give." 

Of The Tempest I make so much as this : that here at 
the close of my three chapters I feel it almost a desecra- 



THE TEMPEST 329 

tion to have put hand — as my method enjoined — into the 
anatomy of such a marvel. May I earn forgiveness by 
a final confession? 

The lights in the royal banqueting-house are out. To- 
morrow the carpenters arrive to take down poles, rollers, 
joists — all the material structure of this play — and, a 
day after, comes the charwoman to sweep up sawdust with 
the odds and ends of tinsel. The lights are out ; the com- 
pany dispersed to go their bright ways and make, in the 
end, other dust. Ariel has nestled to the bat's back and 
slid away, following summer, following darkness like a 
dream. But here are we, three hundred years later, 
treasuring this play in our hearts, as — set in the fore- 
front of the 1623 Folio and by wisest tradition kept 
there — it has for ten generations allured English children 
to their Shakespeare. — 

That was the chirp of Ariel 
You heard, as overhead it flew; 
The farther going, more to dwell 
And wing our green to wed our blue. 
But whether not of joy, or knell. 
Not his own Father-singer knew; 
Nor yet can any mortal tell — 
Save only that it shivers thro' 
The breast of us a sounded shell. 
The blood of us a lighted dew. 

And I conclude by asseverating that were a greater than 
Ariel to wing down from Heaven and stand and offer me 
to choose which, of all the books written in the world, 
should be mine, I should choose — not the Odyssey, not 
the Aeneid, not the Divine Comedy, not Paradise Lost; 
not Othello nor Hamlet nor Lear; but this little 



330 SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

matter of 2,000 odd lines— The Tempest "What? 
—rather than Othello or than Lear?'' Yes: for I can 
just imagine a future age of men, in which their charac- 
terisation has passed into a curiosity, a pale thing of anti- 
quity; as I can barely imagine, yet can just imagine, a 
world in which the murder of Desdemona, the fate of 
Cordelia, will be considered curiously, as brute happen- 
ings proper to a time outlived; and again, while I rever- 
ence the artist who in Othello or in Lear purges our 
passion, forcing us to weep for present human woe, The 
Tempest, as I see it, forces diviner tears, tears for sheer 
beauty; with a royal sense of this world and how it passes 
away, with a catch at the heart of what is to come. And 
still the sense is royal: it is the majesty of art: we feel 
that we are greater than we know. So on the surge of 
our emotion, as on the surges ringing Prospero's island, 
is blown a spray, a mist. Actually it dwells in our eyes,' 
bedimming them: and as involuntarily we would brush it 
away, there rides in it a rainbow; and its colours are 
wisdom and charity, with forgiveness, tender ruth for all 
men and women growing older, and perennial trust in 
young love. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



AlVs Well That Ends Well, 70 

Aristotle, definition of Tragedy 
by, 14, 15; a remarkable in- 
duction by, 116; on episodic 
plays, 222. 

Arnold, Matthew, Austerity of 
Poetry and The Strayed Revel- 
ler quoted, 305. 

As You Like It, the Tale of 
Oamelyn, 98, 99; Lodge's 
Rosalynde, 99; Shakespeare as 
Adam, 99; unimportance of 
the plot, 100; the "old reli- 
gious man," 101 ; the conver- 
sion of Oliver, 101 ; tracking the 
Avon, 102; Shakespeare's very 
Arden, 103; carelessness of de- 
tail, 104; a fantasy in colour, 
105; Jaques and Touchstone 
as 'points of rest,' 105; a con- 
trast of character and colour, 
105, 106; a playful criticism 
of life, 107 ; an exquisite in- 
stance of Shakespeare's con- 
creteness, 108; playing at 
Robin Hood, 109; the be- 
trothal of Oliver and Celia, 
109; Swinburne's and George 
Sand's views, 109, 110; the 
witchery of Rosalind, 110; in- 
fluence of Lyly, 111; dreary 
'wit,' 111; good workmanship 
and botchwork, 112. 

Autobiography in Shakespeare, 
3, 4. 

Ayrer, Jacob, 296. 

Barrie, Sir J. M., 124. 

Beerbohm, Max, 75. 

Belleforest, 184. 

Blair, Robert, a second-hand 
plagiarism, 191. 

Bond, Warwick, his estimate of 
Lyly's influence on Shake- 
speare, 111. 

Bradley, A. C, Lectures on 
Shakespearian Tragedy by, 5, 
14, 16, 30, 44, 159. 



Browne, Sir Thomas, 218. 

Browning, Robert, Misconcep- 
tions quoted, 237; his eulogy 
of Shakespeare, 305. 

Butcher, Prof. S. H., 14. 

Callimachus, 234. 

Campbell, Thomas, 272. 

Capell, Edward, 184. 

Carey, Henry, quoted, 298. 

Carleton, Sir Dudley, 280. 

Chambers, E. K., 121, 122. 

Chaucer, Midsummer-Night's 

Dream and The Knight's Tale, 
73; his tradition kept alive in 
Falstaff, 120. 

Coleridge, his criticism of the 
witches in Macbeth, 34; on the 
character of Hamlet, 178; 
Time, Real and Imaginary, 
quoted, 255; on retrospective 
narrative in The Tempest, 
317; on Miranda, 319. 

Collier, J. P., 275. 

Collins, William, a fatuous criti- 
cism of Shakespeare, 91; on 
the history of The Tempest, 
296. 

Colvin, Sir Sidney, 234. 

Comedy of Errors, The, 6, 65, 70, 
74. 

Cory, W. J., 234. 

Courthope, Dr. W. J., on the date 
of The Tempest, 196. 

Craven, Lord, 280. 

Cunningham, Peter, his discovery 
of Accounts of the Revels, 273, 
281. 

Cymheline, fourth period char- 
acteristics, 199; Imogen's 
wrong, 203; greatness of its 
final scene, 206 ; " unresisting 
imbecility," 232; imperfect 
sympathies, 232; three kinds 
of truth, 233; broken and 
difficult style, 239; no real 
time or place, 241 ; Westward 
for Smelts, 241; the charge of 



833 



334 



INDEX 



incongruity, 242; Imogen the 
be-all and end-all, 242; Swin- 
burne's eulogy, 243; Gervinus 
on Imogen, 244; Shakespeare's 
answer to Johnson, 245; in- 
ability to see the whole for 
the parts, 247; undue com- 
plexity of plot, 248; an amaz- 
ing tour de force, 248; analy- 
sis of the last scene, 249 ; " O 
mighty craftsman! ", 253. 

Darkness, Shakespeare's dra- 
matic use of, 7, 30. 

Davenant, Sir William, 187. 

Davies, Sir John, 328. 

Delius, N., 221, 224. 

De Quincey, his analysis of the 
Porter Scene in Macbeth, 41; 
" mighty poet ! ", 253. 

Dickens, Jowett's estimate of, 
60; a pet device of, 61; on 
character creation, 129; his 
divine discontent, 205. 

Donne, The Ecstasie quoted, 236. 

Dryden, John, on blank verse or 
rhyme as medium for drama, 
186 et seq.; a plagiarism, 191; 
on the unity of time, 303. 

Du Maurier, George, Music 
quoted, 325. 

Dyce, Rev. Alex., 277. 

Elizabeth of Bohemia, 279 et seq. 

Elizabethan Stage, length of per- 
formance, 6; lighting, 7; 
scenery, 8 ; female parts taken 
by boys, 9; developments, 209. 

Fleay, F. G., 221, 224. 
Forman, Simon, 31, 261, 286. 
Furnivall, Dr. F. J., 305. 

Garnett, Dr. Richard, on the 
origin of The Tempest, 278, 
285, 307; on Prospero, 327. 

Gervinus, commentary on the 
witches in Macheth, 33 ; on the 
order of Shakespeare's plays, 
196; on Imogen, 244; on The 
Winter's Tale, 259, 266. 

Globe Theatre, its stage and 
scenery, 7, 8; burning of, 209. 



Golding, Arthur, 73. 
Gollancz, Professor, 224. 
Gosson, Stephen, 87. 
Gower, John, 218. 
Green, Mrs. Everett, 284. 

Halliwell-Phillips, J., 277. 

Hamlet, critical mystification, 
137; an acting play for ordi- 
nary people, 138; the play's 
the thing, 138; its contempo- 
rary popularity, 139 ; a peren- 
nial ' draw,' 140 ; infinite vari- 
ety of stage renderings, 141 ; 
no profound mystery or secret, 
142; the last triumph of a 
masterpiece, 142; the popular 
testimony, 143; some humours 
of interpretation, 143 ; Hazlitt 
on the difficulty of criticising 
the play, 144; a magnificent 
opening, 146 et seq.; the spell 
of superb diction, 150; a great 
feat of artistry, 150; a flaw of 
construction, 152; analysis of 
the second scene, 152 et seq.; 
Polonius on ' The Whole Duty 
of a Young Man,' 157 ; a fam- 
ily trait, 157 ; the loneliness of 
Ophelia, 157; high comedy on 
the edge of tragedy, 158; 
Hamlet's love of his father, 
159 ; the extremity of Hamlet's 
shock, 159; two 'key' pas- 
sages, 161; the super-sanity of 
commentators, 162; death and 
triviality, an illustration from 
Shelley, 162; Hamlet's hys- 
teria good psychology, 163; 
madness a relative term, 164; 
Elizabethan treatment of lu- 
nacy, 165; the Queen's diagno- 
sis of Hamlet's malady, 166; 
the Ghost, 166; Hamlet's 
misogyny, 168; his perverted 
love for Ophelia, 168; his 
affected madness before Polo- 
nius, etc., 169; reasons for 
Hamlet's indecision, 170; a 
German reductio ad ahsurdum, 
171; Professor Raleigh on 
prudential estimates of Ham- 
let, 171; Hamlet's scruples, 



INDEX 



335 



172; meditated suicide, 173; 
the madness of Ophelia, 176; 
Coleridge on the character of 
Hamlet, 178; Coleridge's 
"Smack of Hamlet," 179; 
Carl Karpf on the mythologi- 
cal basis of the play, 180; 
Hazlitt's dictum, " It is we 
who are Hamlet," 181; "a 
permanent condition of man " 
(Victor Hugo), 182; the gene- 
sis of the play, 183; Thomas 
Kyd, 183; the Ophelia of 
Belief orest's story, 184; a 
dramatic oversight, 185; de- 
velopment of Shakespeare's 
blank verse, 186; Dryden's 
arguments in favour of rhyme, 
188; "the great easiness of 
blank verse," 189; the free- 
dom and pliancy of blank 
verse, 193. 

Hardy, Duffus, 277. 

Hazlitt, on the language of Shy- 
lock, 89; on Portia, 90, 92; 
on the Merchant of Venice, 
95; on Jaques, 105; on Fal- 
staff, 136; on criticising Ham- 
let, 144; "It is we who are 
Hamlet," 181; A Farewell to 
Essay-Writing quoted, 310. 

Heine, his views on Shylock, 88. 

Henley, W. E., 41, 205. 

Henry the Eighth, its difference 
from other plays of last group, 
198; the pageantry of the 
historical plays, 228; question 
of authorship, 229; discon- 
nected episodes, 230; three 
climaxes, 230; date of the 
play, 231. 

Henry the Fourth (I and II), a 
dramatic novelty, 114; The 
Famous Victories of King 
Henry the Fifth, 115; a perma- 
nent artistic principle in the 
treatment of history by fic- 
tion, 115; influence on the 
historical novel, 115; a re- 
markable induction by Aris- 
totle, 116; Shakespearian 
treatment of familiar history, 
117; a pageant tetralogy, 118, 



119; a haimting sense of 
doom, 119; the tradition of 
Chaucer, 120; the meaning of 
Interludes, 121 ; their develop- 
ment, 122 ; Shakespeare com- 
bines features of the chronicle 
play and the interlude, 123; 
The Merry Wives of Windsor, 
123; an unrecognisable Fal- 
staff, 124; the progress from 
type to individual, 125; Hot- 
spur and Falstaff on honour, 
126; Falstaff ran away with 
Shakespeare, 127; illustrations 
of similar character control, 
128 ; the testimony of Dickens, 
129; Johnson on Falstaff, 129; 
a Falstaffian episode from 
Boswell, 130; the dismissal of 
Falstaff, 131, 132; Prince 
Hal's soliloquy, 133; why 
Shakespeare killed Falstaff, 
134; a benefaction of laughter, 
136. 

Henry the Sixth, The First Part 
of, 25. 

Hero, the Tragic, Aristotle's 
view of, 15; Shakespeare's 
practice, 17; the essential ele- 
ment, 17. 

Hugo, Victor, on Hamlet, 182. 

Interludes, theories as to the 
meaning of the term, 121. 

Irving, Henry, his rendering of 
Shylock, 88. 

Johnson, Dr., Observations on the 
Tragedy of Macbeth, 26, 27; 
on Lady Macbeth, 54; on the 
' holy hermit ' in Merchant of 
Venice, 96; on Falstaff, 129; 
a Falstaffian episode in Bos- 
well, 130; on the plot of Cym- 
beline, 232; his imperfect sym- 
pathies, 238 ; Shakespeare's 
retaliation, 245. 

Jones, Inigo, develops the 
scenery of the masque, 211. 

Jones, Robert, his Book of Songs 
<e- Airs (1601) quoted, 301. 

Jonson, Ben, development of the 
masque by, 211; his sneer 



INDEX 



at Pericles, 216; Triumph of 
Charis quoted, 236, 311. 
Jowett, Benjamin, a recollection 
of, 60; his estimate of Dick- 
ens, 60; quoted, 217. 

Karpf, Carl, on the mythological 

basis of Hamlet, 180. 
Kean, Charles, 88. 
Keats, Ode to a Nightingale 

quoted, 234. 
Kemble, John, his acting version 

of The Tempest, 264. 
Kyd, Thomas, the lost Hamlet, 

183. 

Lamb, on Imperfect Sympathies, 
233; on Shakespeare's dis- 
guised heroines, 247. 

Lamb, Mary, 247, 265. 

Lang, Andrew, 298. 

Law, Ernest, 281. 

Lee, Sir Sidney, 224. 

Lodge, Thomas, Rosalynde, 98. 

Loening, his view of the secret 
of Hamlet, 144. 

Love's Labour's Lost, 65, 70, 72, 
74, 111. 

Luce, Morton, 297. 

Lyly, John, influence on Love's 
Labour's Lost, 65, 70; influ- 
ence on As You Like It, 111. 

Macbeth, its brevity, 6; its 
sources in Holinshed, 11, 12; 
the supernatural element, 13; 
Shakespeare's capital diflS- 
culty, 13; importance of the 
protagonist, 14; Shakespeare's 
deliberate emphasising of Mac- 
beth's guilt, 19; a Miltonic 
parallel, 20 ; Shakespeare's 
solution of his difficulty, 23; 
crime under hallucination, 24; 
" evil, be thou my good," 24 ; 
Johnson on " the assistance of 
supernatural spirits," 26; the 
essential meaning of witch- 
craft, 29; the atmosphere of 
darkness, 30 ; Schiller, Schlegel 
and Gervinus on the witches, 
32; Coleridge on the Weird 
Sisters, 34; a comparison with 
Marlowe, 35; the dramatic 



value of vagueness and sug- 
gestion, 35; Lady Macbeth's 
freedom from doubt, 37; the 
Knocking at the Gate, 38; De 
Quincey's analysis, 41; sub- 
ordination of minor charac- 
ters, 44 ; the release of tension 
in Hamlet and Macbeth, 45; 
the absence of conscious rhet- 
oric, 47; insignificant agents 
of retribution, 48; Banquo in 
the Chronicle and in the play, 
49; the Point of Rest, 51; 
Macbeth and Banquo under 
temptation, 52; reason for 
Banquo's murder, 53; the 
artistic value of young Mac- 
duff, 53, 54; counterpoise be- 
tween Macbeth and his wife, 
55; affinity with Greek Trag- 
edy, 55; reminiscent irony, 56; 
murder behind the scenes, 
57; superiority to classical 
tragedy, 58 ; Milton's projected 
treatment, 58; Richard Moul- 
ton's classical recast, 58; the 
authenticity of Hecate, 59; a 
triumph of genius and skill, 
.59. 

Macklin, Charles, 88. 

Madden, Sir Frederick, 274. 

Maeterlinck, his use of ' the 
closed door,' 42. 

Marlowe, comparison of the su- 
pernatural in Faustus and 
Macbeth, 35. 

Marvell, Andrew, quoted, 309. 

Masques, their probable influence 
on stage scenery, 211. 

Merchant of Venice, The, where 
it fails in romantic appeal, 
78; setting versus atmosphere, 
79; unsympathetic characters, 
80; character of Bassanio, 81; 
deficient workmanship, 83; in- 
effective contrast of character, 
84; Portia's victory, 84; is 
the moral emptiness inten- 
tional? 85; the three plots, 
86; Ulrici's theory of one im- 
probability excusing another, 
86; the earlier play. The Jew, 
87; Shakespeare's first task in 



INDEX 



the play, 87; Antonio, a static 
character, 88 ; super-subtle 
and sentimental views of Shy- 
lock, 88; how Shylock took 
control of Shakespeare, 89 ; 
Hazlitt on Shylock and Por- 
tia, 89, 90; William Collins 
on Shakespeare, 91; the earli- 
est of Shakespeare's incom- 
parable women, 92 ; the false 
importance of the Trial Scene, 
92; Shakespeare's device for 
concealing the absurdities of 
his plot, 93; Antonio's 
melancholy, 94 ; Launcelot 
Gobbo and Launce in T. G. 
of y., 95; Hazlitt's praise, 
95 ; marvellous stage-clever- 
ness, 95; a loose end and what 
it proves, 96; Johnson's obser- 
vation on the ' holy hermit,' 
96; loveliness past compare, 
96; the ending of a fairy-tale, 
97. 

Merry Wives of Windsor, 72, 
123. 

Milton, Paradise Lost and Mac- 
beth, 20; his projected hand- 
ling of Macbeth, 58; on the 
use of blank verse for epic, 186. 

Montaigne, 292. 

Morgann, Maurice, 127. 

Morris, William, Love is Enough 
quoted, 270. 

Moulton, Richard, his classical 
recast of Macbeth, 58. 

Midsummer-Night's Dream, A, 
women disguised as men, 62; 
order of the earlier comedies, 
64; construction before char- 
acterisation, 65; learning and 
unlearning, 66; written for a 
court wedding, 68; echoes of 
Spenser's Epithalamion, 68 ; 
hypothetical process of con- 
struction, 70 et seq.; importa- 
tion of poetry into the drama, 
73; the true Shakespearian 
humour, 74 ; importance of the 
fairies, 75; an ideal setting 
for the play, 76. 

Newman, J. H., 187. 



Patmore, Coventry, his theory 
of the Point of Rest, 51. 

Pericles, its popularity, 215; 
Ben Jonson's sneer, 216; a 
new thing, 218; epic or ro- 
mance in terms of the drama, 
218; treatment of unity of 
time, 219; authenticity of first 
two acts, 220; a badly-told 
story, 221 ; an episodic play, 
222; inartistic irrelevance, 
223; the result of verse tests, 
223; authenticity of the 
brothel scenes, 224; their con- 
nection with the recognition 
scene, 226. 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, on the 
Elizabethan stage, 9; on pru- 
dential estimates of Hamlet, 
171 ; on the authorship of 
Pericles, 224; on the death of 
Antigonus, 263. 

Reade, Charles, his views on 
plagiarism, 64. 

Richard the Third, 85. 

Rosalynde, As You Like It and, 
98. 

Sand, George, her adaptation of 
As You Like It, 109. 

Saxo Grammaticus, 184. 

Scenery, the probable develop- 
ment of, on the Elizabethan 
stage, 8. 

Schiller, his adaptation of Mac- 
beth, 32. 

Schlegel, his view of the witches 
in Macbeth, 32. 

Scot, Reginald, Discover}/ of 
Witchcraft by, 25. 

Shelley, his description of Bea- 
trice Cenci going to her death, 
162. 

Shipwreck, Shakespeare's use of, 
as a dramatic device, 62. 

Siddons, Mrs., her interpretation 
of Lady Macbeth, 54. 

Sidney, Sir Philip, 188, 219. 

Skeat, Professor, his view of the 
Tale of Gamelyn, 98. 

Spenser, Epithalamion quoted, 
68; plagiarised by Dryden, 
191. 



338 



INDEX 



Steevens, George, 180. 

Stevenson, R. L., quoted, 4. 

Swinburne, criticism of As You 
Like It, 109; eulogy of Imo- 
gen, 243. 

Tale of Gamelyn, 98, 99. 

Tempest, The, its place in the 
Folio, 272; Shakespeare's last 
work, 272; Peter Cunning- 
ham's evidence for the date, 
273 et seq.; brevity of the 
play, 274; hypothesis concern- 
ing its origin, 278; Elizabeth 
of Bohemia, 279; was the play 
recast? 282; written for a 
wedding, 282; the marriage 
of the Prince Palatine, 283; 
Ben Jonson's jibe, 287; the 
evidence of metrical tests, 
287; the evidence of work- 
manship, 287 ; comparison 
with The Winter's Tale, 288 et 
seq.; Gonzalo and Montaigne, 
292; a glorious invention, 
294; an exquisite surprise, 
295; the most beautiful love- 
scene in Shakespeare, 296; 
Collins' story of a lost origi- 
nal, 296; Die Schone Sidea, 
296; a drama of reconcilia- 
tion, 301; Shakespeare's solu- 
tion of a capital difficulty, 
303; unities not laws but 
graces, 303; the stationary 
setting of the play, 307; the 
two masqikes, 307; resem- 
blance to Midsummer-Night's 
Dream, 308 ; reconstructing 
the performance at Court, 
309, et seq.; excellence of the 
storm scene, 313; alleged in- 
consistencies, 314; realism 
leading up to the incredible, 
316; retrospective narration, 
317; Coleridge on Miranda, 
319; Caliban, 322; the im- 
portance of Stephano, 323; 
comparison with Midsummer- 
Night's Dream, 325; Prospero, 
327; the majesty of art, 330. 



Tennyson, Maud quoted, 237. 
Terry, Ellen, 278. 
Twine, Laurence, 218. 
Two Gentlemen of Verona, 67, 
70, 74, 94. 

Unity of Time, disregard of, in 
last plays, 201; Sir Philip 
Sidney's jibe, 219; Dryden's 
view, 303. 

Venus and Adonis, 70, 73. 
Vicar of Wakefield, The, 97. 
Vinting, E. P., his theory that 
Hamlet was a woman, 143. 

Waller, Edmond, 187, 197. 

Ward, Sir A. W., 121. 

Warton, Thomas, 296. 

Wendell, Professor Barrett, 239, 
248, 260. 

Werder, Professor, on Hamlet's 
legal difficulties, 171. 

Wilkins, George, 221. 

Winter's Tale, The, fourth period 
characterisation, 199; echoes 
of Pericles, 254; the gap of 
sixteen years, 255; charge of 
having two separate plots, 
256 ; pedantic fault-finding, 
257 ; ' romantic ' drama, 258 ; 
first three acts not complete in 
themselves, 258; the jealousy 
of Leontes, 260; futile ex- 
planations, 261 ; some care- 
less workmanship, 262; the 
death of Antigonus, 263; the 
uselessness of Autolycus, 265; 
the scamping of the recogni- 
tion scene, 266; the play 
leaves no single impression, 
269; the admirable Paulina, 
269. 

Witchcraft, the place of, in the 
Elizabethan drama, 25, 27. 

Wordsworth, his weakness for 
repetition, 205; The River 
Duddon; Afterthought quoted, 
235. 

Wotton, Sir Henry, 279. 

Wright, W. Aldis, 277. 



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